Religion Dispatches
…there’s also a drink for you. Evan Benn, the official beer taster for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, offered this: Stone Levitation Ale would be a no-brainer — a flavorful but not super strong craft beer that will help lift you up to meet your maker…Cocktail-wise, I don’t know if it fits the theme, but the drink that I’ve been seeing all over at fancy-schmancy cocktail bars is the Corpse Reviver No. 2. It’s a mix of gin, lemon juice and some other…
Read More…in the twilight, and a pale sliver of moon was visible to the left of the stage just when the reading began. It was a mesmerizing space of two hours in every sense, because all the senses were quickened. This, I thought, was Rome at its best and most seductive. Perhaps it was America at its best as well. Greer went first and he recognized his role in this grand affair. He was the opening act, the warm-up band, and he handled his role with humilit…
Read More…esisted, due in no small part to the cautionary advice of some of his closest staff advisors. Well after his assassination, in 1966, President Johnson significantly upped the military ante, and the troop numbers, committing the US to an all-out land and air assault; that was when the staggering casualties, on both sides, commenced. The analogy as I have set it up paints President Obama in the role of John Kennedy, young and charismatic and new to…
Read More…ality because they truly are not prejudiced instead of fearing that they might “look prejudiced,” but it’s a good first step….
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…argument against abortion has become an unsubtle weapon in the larger contest of Christian conversion. For other religious traditions do countenance abortions, because they do not grant the fetus the same status, nor the same rights, as those that they grant to human beings. These are not aberrant sects; these are prominent forms of Judaism and Islam, among others. All of this is missing in the ad because the family and the groups for whom it advo…
Read More…weight with the followers of the late Jerry Falwell. Evangelicals, Pentocostals, Fundamentalists, Millenarians… it is a very complex religious map, indeed, a vats coalition unto itself. And the party will not kow-tow to them in this time of introspection. A great many Republicans who voted for George W. Bush twice did not vote for John McCain because of the Palin nomination; they expected someone with more heft and experience, and probably one wi…
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…seems merely the latest skirmish in a far longer war. Indeed, one of the most striking features of much contemporary discussion of the battle between religion and science is the way both sides (rest assured, there are really more than two) sound like sandlot adolescents arguing about “who started it.” The scientists have apparently never forgiven the Church for its treatment of Galileo. And many contemporary Christians are not having what Carl Sag…
Read More…itself. Generally speaking, attorneys general have all agreed on the broadest construction of presidential power to make such recess appointments; where there is a vacancy the President may appoint. The second question concerns how long the Senate must be in recess before the President can make such an appointment (Theodore Roosevelt once made recess appointments during a recess lasting less than one full day). In asking the Executive and Legislat…
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…as learned from her mistakes. That’s the problem, in a nutshell. Not her past mistakes, but her past. It is simply unimaginable that the Democratic Party, in the wake of the disastrous second term of a second Bush presidency, would field a candidate who herself represents a dynasty. If the U.S. electorate is to learn anything from the second Bush presidency, it is that returning to the same family for a second presidential candidate is always a ba…
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…But this outcome may well prove to be a form of secularism that even the most strident of secularists may have a hard time accepting. That is how deep the cultural commitment to such a social convention runs in the United States today. Jesus may not have been married, but he went to weddings and even blessed one with wine. But he did not marry himself, and the modern state would not have recognized his relationship with the mysterious Mary at all….
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