Religion Dispatches
…still here, how will I know when it happens? What music should I play? And most importantly, what’s a good cocktail to serve for Judgment Day? Peter Finocchiaro at Salon deserves a lot of credit for delving into Camping’s reasons for why he predicts May 21 will be Judgment Day, which has something to do with the anniversary of Noah’s Ark, the end of Tribulation, which began 23 years ago (Who knew?) and the mathematical formula 5+10+17=Armageddon….
Read More…e 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 humility and self-effacing dignity. There is nothing more surprising, nor more pleasurable, than having the warm-up band make you wish them to hang around. He hung around. Greer’s…
Read More…perfect analogies, of course, but suggestive connections there surely are. Most of them received a helpful airing. But one matter of real and growing concern was not discussed. The transition from a French police action to a US war was one important transition well described by various experts from all bands of the political spectrum. But the transition from Kennedy’s police action to Johnson’s war has received less attention that it should have….
Read More…have recognized same-sex civil unions or domestic partnerships with all or most of the benefits associated with marriage. In the 2012 election, after an unbroken string of losses on popular referenda, gay marriage proponents prevailed on all four state ballot initiatives addressing the issue. Voters in Maryland, Maine, and Washington approved referenda expressly authorizing the recognition of gay marriage, and Minnesota voters rejected an amendmen…
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…others. All of this is missing in the ad because the family and the groups for whom it advocates miss the non-Christians in the audience and in the country. The whole framework of the anti-abortion argument really amounts to the desire to make the nation more Christian and less Jewish, or less Muslim, or what have you. While I remain committed to free speech, even and especially at the Super Bowl, it is high time that verses other than John 3:16,…
Read More…The fractures within the Party have not subsided. They are intensifying almo*]}*st daily, and the focus of this maelstrom is none other than Sarah Palin. The intellectual leadership of the battered Grand Old Party is now willing to say publicly that she was unqualified to serve in this capacity, was a regrettable choice with disastrous electoral consequences, and that she was an embarrassment to match. Palin is not having it, not any of it. She will…
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…wider by the day. While the perception of which group best represents the most tempting alternative to traditional religion is debatable, no one seems to dispute the fact that this dispute will be, and probably must be, increasingly strident and increasingly shrill. Yet there is a dawning sense that this rhetoric of cultural warfare leaves a lot of spiritually inquisitive people out of the equation and that, in the words of author Elizabeth Gilbe…
Read More…s the new junior Senator from the State of Illinois. The cries of outrage, mostly from the Democratic side, came immediately, and somewhat surprisingly, even President-elect Obama inserted himself into the fray by suggesting that the Democrats should block this appointment, if only for the practical reason that any such senatorial appointee would be too “tainted” by the Governor’s own troubles to legislate effectively. This seems upside down, ever…
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…ave waged this War on Terror as the second wave of the first Gulf War that most of them remember personally. And the dirty secret behind that way of waging this war is that it is a shared legacy. The second Bush team has used weapons President Clinton put in their arsenal, the USA Patriot Act most dramatically (Clinton wanted it and could not pass it; the Bush team pulled it out of the presidential drawer immediately after 9/11). We fail to rememb…
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…ornia’s now-infamous Proposition 8 (and its long legal aftermath) is the almo*]}*st reflexive assumption on all sides that marriage, somehow, is a norm—a desirable norm. And so the argument swiftly becomes an argument about normalcy: about who is normal, and about who may be privileged to participate in normalizing social institutions like marriage. On the Constitutional side of the ledger, the question hinges on a legal conception of discrimination,…
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