Religion Dispatches
…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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…g with regard to religious practice in particular. Both internet and smart phone users were more likely to participate in religious or spiritual groups than were people who do not regularly use digital media. By “participate,” the researchers were referring to physical, geographically located, face-to-face engagement: attending meetings, volunteering, taking leadership roles, and donating money. In all of these categories, participation was higher…
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…etimes communication technologies facilitated that friendship (a letter, a phone call). In the new age the structure is reversed as friendships are built upon those very communication technologies. We are now databases, plugged into a network. Face-to-face friendships have become interface friendships. A more ethereal ethernet was evoked in Inception. Here too people are linked to each other through a social network, and here too identities are…
Read More…ge that porn was the major driver of internet technological and capacity innovation before the advent of the smart phone. And if we want to start a serious conversation about where presidential candidates get their money and how ethical that money is, let’s do it. I have a laundry list of labor, environmental, feminist, and human rights issues with multinational corporations I’d love to start working through. But don’t give me a thin, opportunis…
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…a’s auto-da-fé came not only in the comments section, but in nasty emails, phone calls, and demands for his firing from Messiah College. As he discovered, the culture wars are real, and practiced even on those (like Fea) who largely have been critical of Obama’s actual implementation of his promises about faith-based policies. More important than these blogosphere wars, however, is understanding something deeper about these screeds about Obama as…
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…or exhorted on homosexuals to repent or be punished by God before the microphone was snatched away one of Kato’s supporters. It might have seemed that the last person the activist’s friends would turn to for support at the moment would be another religious leader. Especially given that the church in Uganda was at the head of the drive for the draconian anti-homosexuality bill still pending in Parliament. But 79-year-old Bishop Christopher Senyonjo…
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…to Wal-Mart, ate pizza in their hotel rooms, spent hours with them on the phone. Then, after Jesus was a no-show, I stayed in contact with them—the ones who would talk to me, anyway—over the following days and months, checking back in to see how or if their thinking had changed. I learned a lot about the seductive power of radical belief, the inscrutable vagaries of biblical interpretation, and how our minds can shape reality to fit a narrative….
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…to atheism than its more dismissive predecessors. RD spoke with Maguire by phone about his latest book and the future of belief. What was the impetus for undertaking this after a long career as a priest and theologian who was once a believer? I started out as the absolute true believer. I believed everything the Vatican taught. One of the things that helped me was working in a parish. I started to meet real people and to discover that some of the…
Read More…imself an unexpected media darling. Becky Garrison caught up with Bell via phone to talk about his motivations, the reactions of his friends and family, and what he hopes to discover. BG: What’s your reaction to this surge of media coverage? RB: When I started this, I thought my blog would only be read by a few people. It’s been surreal. I have no clue how to make anything go viral, so this is totally unexpected. But eventually, I think this atten…
Read More…ot. After that, he stayed more often after class, one day whipping out his phone to show me a photo of a white supremacist leader standing up in a convertible during what was obviously a white pride parade. The red-faced, fist waving man in the picture was flanked by two little girls sitting in the back seat, arms crossed with very pronounced frowns on their faces. “They don’t look all that happy,” I remarked to my student. “Those are my daughters…
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