Religion Dispatches
…w are you going to announce it over social media if you don’t have a smart phone? And smartphones: they are helpful, but they are also limited. I’m working with some of my guides to develop what’s called a WisePhone, and it’s smarter than a smartphone. What are some of the features of the WisePhone? You won’t lose it anymore because it won’t be influenced by gravity, so it won’t fall down the cracks of your couch. It will also be able to tweet or…
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…e supremacist movements.” I catch up with the Rev. David Ostendorf by cell phone while he is waiting for a plane at an East Coast airport. He is the executive director of the CNC where Ward works. Ostendorf, A United Church of Christ minister, once led PrairieFire Rural Action, a group that tried to save family farms during a major agricultural economic crisis in the 1980s. “Back then we helped build a popular economic political movement among fam…
Read More…ely crazy?” “Yes, of course!” I was quick to answer. But I realized as I answered that the question came from just such a person—a student so different from me that I was not likely to respect him or his views. Yes, I am a hater. Perhaps I am not on par with other famous haters—like Westboro Baptist’s Fred Phelps, who reportedly lies near death in a Topeka, Kansas, hospice after being excommunicated from the church he founded in 1955. But I remain…
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…ghlighted the irony of a childless man scolding those without children. My phone went wild with calls from animal lovers, queer friends and childless Catholic couples as well. An estimated 1.1 billion people belong to the Roman Catholic church. But even many of those who aren’t Catholic consider the pope’s words influential or have concerns about how his words can affect cultures, laws, and policies. I understood why they were dismayed. As an inte…
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…ed in Guyana). Funny stuff, right? Satire about religion is a double-edged sword. American popular culture has long been fascinated with cults. After the Heaven’s Gate suicide, Family Guy as well as the comedy Road Trip (2000) poked fun at the mass suicide meme. By portraying cult leaders as suicidal maniacs and cult members as helpless losers, these comedies reinforced a distinction between healthy, “normal” religion and deviant “cult” religion….
Read More…erence talk shaming homosexuality. “I have a brother who said to me on the phone last Christmas, ‘Elder Packer says God does not make gays. This is your choice.’ And then he used some very hurtful language with me,” Jahn relates. “I had to hang up on him. But he feels he has been given permission to speak this way by the prophet.” “Even a simple phrase uttered by a General Authority can give Church members broad permission to look down on, discrim…
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…k millennials ages 18-29 comprise 20% of historically black churches. This number is roughly comparable to that of the baby boomer generation. Thus, religious affiliation for young black adults does not show the same kind of downward shift as that of the non-black population (the data on black children in the generation after the millennials suggest high levels of religiosity as well). African Americans in general, and African-American women in pa…
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…le: these monsters are a five billion dollar industry. They appear in cell phone ads for Sprint, they chase runners in 5Ks, and they scare crowds at haunted houses and theme parks. With The Walking Dead and World War Z, zombies cemented their reign as the favored monster of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The zombie’s ubiquity begs for explanation, and there is no shortage of theories. David Denby, writing about World War Z …
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…on the employee to relieve all her stress through self-development? The answer is compassion. I’m hoping that if you could always include kindness and compassion in the mindfulness curriculum, people will become even more aware of their own suffering and the suffering of those around them. If nobody complains about stress, they don’t do anything. What if everybody is aware, “Oh my gosh, we have all this stress?”—an awareness that comes from mindf…
Read More…ernet 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, opportunistic connect-the-Mormon-dots story and pr…
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