Religion Dispatches
…ly imagine the weariness induced by the attempt to constantly acclimate to new hardware as well as new software. What do touchscreens have to do with encyclicals? This would have been an absurd question just ten years ago. But for today’s wired believers, if you don’t have a digital device, you probably won’t even read those encyclicals. Paper is so yesterday. The Pope’s 2011 observations about the dangers of social media are fairly astute, even i…
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…ving the bored teenage souls of Madeline and her friend Lisa, somewhere in New York. Down the hall, my parents are asleep. It’s past midnight, and I know, somehow, that I’m the only kid in my chicken-coop suburb beholding this miraculous visitation, wondrous as the presentation of the hermaphrodite in Fellini’s Satyricon. To be sure, Bowie’s a freak—code for “fag” among the real-life Jeff Spicolis in my junior high class, righteous dudes whose ide…
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…n. They went 78 percent for Romney, up from 74 percent for McCain. The bad news for the Republicans is that, according to Pew, the evangelical share of the population continues to erode—from 21 percent in 2007 to 19 percent in 2012—while the number of the religiously unaffiliated is rising—from 16 percent to 20 percent over the same period. In other words, “nones” and evangelicals are equivalent in numbers. One explanation for this change in Ameri…
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…f the top stories that intersect religion and science, there was some good news, some not-so-good news and some downright depressing news. Of course, no list of the top science/religion stories can be done without first acknowledging the obvious political agenda some religious conservatives have in fostering this divide, and sadly, Rick Santorum is still at it. The former Pennsylvania senator, who has long led efforts to combat the teaching of evo…
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…hich he stated, referring to the capture of Somali warlord Osman Atto, ‘I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.’” According to Rodda, Mansfield said that “Gen. Boykin gave many in the field just the kind of warrior code they needed to fulfill their duties with moral passion.” In an extensive, and highly-documented, review of Mansfield’s Ten Tortured Words, Rodda, pointed out that the book was…
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…t in technology. The principalities are the Bible’s relevance to the daily news. A friend remembers that “wherever he went, Stringfellow had a newspaper in one hand and his Bible in the other.” This kind of talk can turn the world upside down. We are surrounded by beasts and dragons right out of the book of Revelation, and we fan their flames with our faith. Consequently Stringfellow’s God is not just a character to whom we must defer to for the s…
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When news broke this past Friday that a controversial Instagram photo would result in Jerry Falwell, Jr. taking an “indefinite leave of absence” as president of Liberty University, it was only the latest in a string of incidents with Falwell at the center of the public spotlight. The offending picture features Falwell holding a dark-colored drink (which he calls “black water”) and his arm around a female friend’s waist. Falwell’s pants are unzipp…
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…his wasn’t 100 percent.” As we’ve moved from an election dominated by fake news to a new Trump administration run on the principle of “alternative facts,” it’s worth taking some time to ponder what seems to be contemporary conservative credulity. We should certainly be reminded of the term “truthiness” that Stephen Colbert invented in October 2005 to capture some of the pronouncements of the George W. Bush administration. As he explained then, tru…
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…ics when he remarked to Silvan Shalom, Israel’s foreign minister, that the new museum would promote tolerance “just as building health clubs promoted health.” This was not the first time that the Wiesenthal Center and the LA Museum of Tolerance formulated its own foreign policy; and in doing so implied that they were speaking for the American Jewish community at large. The center endorsed enthusiastically the Bush administration’s Iraq War, and in…
Read More…e cis-het patriarchy and want the world to receive it as a universal moral code. They would be just as happy if you didn’t notice that they can only provide one particular interpretation of the gospel, rather than an objective and unchanging truth. To boot, it’s an interpretation that isn’t even fully shared by other conservative religious groups, nor is it without controversy even within the Southern Baptist Convention. Take, for example, the que…
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