Religion Dispatches
…but not a shot of cachaça [a popular hard liquor].” Without essentializing Brazilian culture, anthropologists such as Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and Roberto DaMatta have observed that Brazilians value very highly informality, the personal touch, the affective force and cordiality of friendship and kinship ties, and the intimacy of home as a space of human warmth, authenticity and safety against the competitive, impersonal, and cold world of the str…
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…tended a meeting he organized, because 22 years ago it was prophesied that Brazil would have a president who would fear the Lord. Terra Nova declared new skies over Brazil and the advancement and power of God over the nation. Terra Nova has also had a close relationship with Israel. He directs, for example, the Brazilian branch of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, which has reportedly brought tens of thousands of Christian tourists to…
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…tended a meeting he organized, because 22 years ago it was prophesied that Brazil would have a president who would fear the Lord. Terra Nova declared new skies over Brazil and the advancement and power of God over the nation. Terra Nova has also had a close relationship with Israel. He directs, for example, the Brazilian branch of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, which has reportedly brought tens of thousands of Christian tourists to…
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…States—have exported the U.S. Christian right’s extreme homophobia to the Brazilian context. They are also in Brazil’s congress. The “parliamentary coup” that removed liberal president Dilma Rousseff from office was accomplished with back-benchers affiliated with evangelical Christian groups. Indeed, the investigation against her was initiated by Congressional Speaker Eduardo Cunha, who had a history of anti-gay remarks (and called on Congress to…
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…cost of true discipleship. The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap…We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale; we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition…Was there ever a more terrible and disastrous instance of Christianizing the world than this? It’s regrettable, I think, that “cheap grace” has turned into a kind of meme that Rod Dreher can toss into his debate with Andrew Sullivan without…
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…church, they’re marinating, so to speak, in the the various teachings of a number of people. I’ve covered many an event where I’ve been waiting in line to get in, and the inevitable conversation with the people around you goes something like this: they ask first where you go to church, and second which teachers you admire, and then you get into a long conversation about the relative virtues of all of them. A really good example of how all these te…
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…a random sample size and therefore isn’t statistically representative. The number of individuals reporting victimization in Episcopal spaces is alarming nonetheless. However, I would argue the data is more likely to under- than to overestimate the scope of the abuse that occurs. To see why, the survey results must be interpreted in light of the Episcopal Church’s larger culture of inaction around sexual violence. See no evil, hear no evil… LGBTQ+…
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…tal volunteers—who would come in to teach job skills and do Bible study—outnumbered Catholic volunteers by about 15 to 1. Also in the city I was in the vast majority of inmates were from the poorer parts, where there are more Pentecostals. But the main reason for the dominance of Pentecostalism was because they believe in the potential for God to radically change a person’s life. The once-I-was-lost-but-now-I’m-found narrative in Pentecostalism re…
Read More…plugged-in lifestyle doesn’t really get at the heart of the issue. I think the Amish, of all people, have it right. It’s not so much about what you as an individual are doing or not doing, as the effect technology has on the community: Why not make life easier and just put [a phone] in the house? “What would that lead to?” another Amish man asked me. “We don’t want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a tel…
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…ability of cell phones to be used for impure activities, some Jewish cell-phone users have requested so-called “kosher” phones. The idea is to offer conservative Jews a phone that is free of “corrupting influences” of the sort that are already avoided by ultra-orthodox Jews through a ban on television and some radio. Reuters reported in February 2008 that Bezeq Israel Telecom launched a new “kosher” landline phone service, which will block calls…
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