Religion Dispatches
…erous. It’s also iconic—the world’s preeminent adventure sports pilgrimage site. And that iconic status somehow makes it easier for us to overlook that danger. The results are ethically fraught. Is the risk worth the reward? Are affluent climbers culpable for Sherpa deaths? Is $2,000-$6,000, the going salary for Sherpas, fair pay for one of the most dangerous jobs on earth? The power imbalance between locals and foreigners is especially apparent t…
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…McArdle, a student at Thomas Aquinas College who writes for the right-wing site the College Fix. McArdle reports there is a new trend seen “on campuses nationwide.” College students are increasingly in favor of infanticide, or “post-birth abortion.” They say a woman has the right not only to terminate her pregnancy, but to put to death a child up to the age of 4 or 5. The report has been accepted—apparently uncritically—by Gene Veith, who teaches…
Read More…ns who are pressing for Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount: Tensions at the site have been escalating as some Israeli lawmakers have stepped up provocations to reverse the long-standing ban on Jewish prayer there, once considered a fringe position but now a growing rallying cry on the Israeli right. No Israeli prime minister since the war of June 1967, when the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem began — including stalwarts Menachem Begin, Ariel S…
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…its snack bar,” according to Schuller’s biography on the Hour of Power website. “One hundred persons attended that first Sunday, all in their cars. Dr. Schuller, who believe[d] this outdoor ministry experience helped inspire him to later build the all-glass Crystal Cathedral, often state[d], ‘It was there I fell in love with the sky!’” Interior of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif, 2005. Image via Wiki Commons. Schuller’s congregation…
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…of real estate in the world. The decades-long arrangement under which the site was administered by a special trust in Jordan is coming unglued under unrelenting pressure by ultra-orthodox Jews who want to see a Third Temple erected there. Leading Israeli politicians pander to these pressures, making their own provocative statements. Worse, these same politicians backed versions of a proposed nationality law—hugely controversial in Israel and amon…
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Religion Dispatches, your favorite indie religion site (and go-to source for awkward dinner conversation starters) is nominated for a 2015 Webby Award in the Religion & Spirituality category. We are thrilled! The Webbys are the Oscars of the Internet. We’ve been honored with a Webby nomination a number of times before and it never gets old. But… we confess we’re starting to nurture a bit of a Susan Lucci complex — always a nominee, never (yet) a…
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…our book can move some of them? I hope so. I think that the most promising site of dialogue is intergenerational in evangelical families, either because a young person comes out or because young people have friends who they also become loyal to and they find the tension between caring about their friends and processing what they’re being told at home and at church to be unbearable and they want to talk about it. The transformative change that I ha…
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…ed that the opposition was based on inaccurate information found on one website, discoverthenetworks.org, a product of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The site is still in operation today. This experience was my wake-up call that right-wing Jewish organizations are using our campuses to promote a specific political narrative about Israel and Palestine, using threats, intimidation and donor monies to further their goals. At the beginning of this…
Read More…s will come to nothing. The non-partisan GovTrack, an open government data site, puts the likelihood of HR 153 becoming a law at zero percent. This bill will never come to a vote, probably, disappearing into the Ways and Means committee never to be heard from again. The question is: why aren’t Republicans supporting it? Religious conservatives are rallying around religious liberty issues, including the rights of churches to get involved in politic…
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…ry popular culture defies the ability to locate any cultural object at one site or sites. And in the case of postural yoga, we cannot locate it in my chosen sites alone. However, as a practical move, this study uses them as windows into the incalculable sites of the construction, dissemination, and practice of yoga. I had to carefully select from case studies in my effort to demonstrate that the postural practice we most associate with yoga today…
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