Religion Dispatches
…art lending again, once we’ve given them enough public subsidy. I was kind of hoping that we might begin to imagine something a little different from the world we have known: a world of infinite debt, infinite captivity, and infinite pain….
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…fight. If someone had pressed into his fingers at that pivotal moment the phone number for The Trevor Project, he might reach out and hear a voice of reassurance, a voice that gave him hope for life by, in part, repudiating the so-called biblical teaching that who he is amounts to an offense against God. If he’d had a sense of belonging to a community that embraced him for who he is, maybe his hope wouldn’t be so fully shattered. But while other…
Read More…e same way it does regarding slavery, or viewing women as property, or any number of things that our culture no longer affirms or accepts. My perspective can best be summarized in a quote from my theological hero, John Caputo: “My own view is that the outcome of a careful debate about these matters would be to show that there simply are no arguments to show that homosexual love is of itself anything else than love, and that therefore, since the es…
Read More…ou need to know to keep on reading? I’d cheerfully watch that man read the phone book. So, when my buddy Rev. El Mundo sent me the link to the comedian’s message, I eagerly clicked on it. I was surprised when I saw this wasn’t a clip of his latest hysterical stand up, but an essay he penned for the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog. The topic of his essay was how he came to be an atheist. The whole piece is here. While there is humor in the pie…
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…followers who were walking the walk and not just talking the talk. If the world liked me, then I was of the world, the last thing I wanted. I reveled in being astringent, bracing, and honest. According to the Bible, salt that loses its savor is useless. It’s fit for nothing. Twelve years ago, I was living a life that was not lining up with my inner convictions and that became untenable. I mean, talk about hypocrisy. It’s a miserable life to be sor…
Read More…k’s defenders would just stop caring, since the story no longer fit their worldview. I was very, very wrong. The Liberty Institute, which represents Monk legally, is doubling down. After the release of the Air Force investigation, they produced two documents which show that Monk’s transfer date was moved from September 30th to August 14th. The Liberty Institute believes that, This documentation shows that the commander indeed reassigned Monk in a…
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…TREO, and I’m not canceling the media package on my phone or reducing the number of messages I sent through that magical device. I am not calling for a technology purge. I’m simply noting that technology comes with a price, and this price has something of a postmodern twist. By this I mean that tweeting and other high-tech modalities of exchange send information about happenings, attitudes, feelings, and events—but in a way that disconnects life…
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…or “Muslim-minority” regions. The whole world is isomorphic with a Muslim world differentiated by numbers; often, though not necessarily, a road to more democratic perception. Demographics aren’t the perfect determinant, but they’re better than any other determinant we have. The most important consequence? Because America has Muslims, America is a Muslim-minority nation. That means America is as much a part of a global Muslim conversation as any o…
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…vering Southern Baptist, I was taught that our job was to go out into the world and convert people to my religion. And yet, in the book, you say the whole basis of that “evangelical” bent of many Christian churches, the “Great Commission” in Matthew, wasn’t an order to convert the world to our religion. What does it really mean? It means you have to go beyond the boundaries of your own security system based on your own fears. It means you have to…
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…cy to utilize arguments about Judaism to explain many of the problems the world confronts, whether they be in the Muslim world or in European countries, where there is a way in which thinking about Israel is a way of thinking about what is most in need of perfection in the world. We should probably worry more about something like these tweets because we’re in a space in which the use of anti-Judaism as a way of fantasizing the perfection of the wo…
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