Religion Dispatches
…campaign enters the final days, Candidate Romney increasingly exhorts his audiences to dare to have faith in the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen” (Hebrews 11.1), to dare to imagine a whole new life for themselves under this very rich man’s care, to dare to believe in the Gospel of Wealth, and to be saved, finally, from real-world lives that are going nowhere in the $10/hour economy. Watching Romney’s preacherly side…
Read More…gossip-, and hate-mongers love words like “antisemitism” and “racism”: because they allege something so horrible that, like a traffic accident or Qaddafi video, you just have to look. No surprise, then, that a Jewish far-right organization named “Emergency Committee for Israel” has produced a cheap YouTube video showing a couple of crazy people at Occupy Wall Street shouting antisemitic slogans. For good measure, they’ve thrown in Barack Obama, N…
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…and nuns, Christian and otherwise, live in monasteries and convents; and a number of historic Protestant churches, especially those best endowed financially, provide parsonages. But over time, an increasing number of clergy have made their own living arrangements. Churches found parsonages prohibitively expensive; congregants preferred to see their donations go toward services rather than clergy housing; and new religious ventures, especially the…
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…Using an 1873 federal law that he wrote (the “Comstock Act”), he used his authority to seize objectionable material and prosecute people for transmitting “obscene” items through the US mail. Comstock went after lottery subscriptions, pornography, pulp fiction magazines, and even tracts advocating religious freethought. Anthony Comstock, postal crusader. Comstock’s “passion” (pun intended), however, was sex. Of all the forms of vice that he deplor…
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…holiday.” For true believers, mundane life pales in comparison to this annual Labor Day gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Often tagged as a countercultural festival, it is not really that at all. Burners are the culture, and among its most privileged members, with money and time to spend. Many of them hold down regular jobs in small businesses or corporate America: they are teachers and college students, massage therapists and social worke…
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…s “Geek Mail,” “I simply want nothing to do with a game that ridicules and makes fun of personal, deeply held beliefs, no matter how much the game’s designer claims ‘it’s all in fun.’” But not everyone had scruples. George Juillerat found out about the game six months before its release and was immediately smitten. “Pretty much anything blasphemous or satirical about religion is going to catch my attention,” he explained. Juillerat, who is a board…
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…“Republicanity” now seems to operate as a religion, with its own myths, rituals, theologies, and ethics. In the second, he identified an important “teaching moment” that this discussion and debate have created. What this summer’s debate over the debt ceiling and the straw polls have made clear is that the Republican Party is now involved in a difficult battle over its own orthodoxy. Strange as the comparison may seem, what we’re seeing today is hi…
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…lly neglects the psychological toll that accompanies every war: the post-traumatic stress that seizes up in societies that are chronically beset—either by war and terrorist violence, or by state counter-insurgency, domestic security, and counter-terrorism programming. If terrorism is geopolitical, it’s because it damages psyches as much as bodies. In emphasizing the geopolitical aspect of its “War on Terror,” has the West missed the fact that it h…
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…untled customer. It is a witness to an abomination. It is a plea for spiritual recompense. In the video message that was played before my last United Airlines flight, you expressed your desire to greet each and every passenger; you invited us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. If I could greet you now, I would want to know: were you unaware of the monstrosity that was about to follow? There, rising above the hiss of the pressurized air, as…
Read More…rwritten by a Jewish casino tycoon, walked into a Baptist church where the audience had been primed with speeches about how “God intended” marriage to be “between one man and one woman” and how their state was on the verge of being taken over by the “vice” of gambling. But it wasn’t a joke, it was a Newt Gingrich campaign appearance at a Presidential Forum, hosted by the conservative Christian legal group Liberty Counsel and others, at Aloma Bapti…
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