Religion Dispatches
…ngs to fly, you flew to me, you flew to me. “In the secret space of dreams, where I dreaming lay amazed. When the secrets all are told, and the petals all unfold. When there was no dream of mine, you dreamed of me.”…
Read More…prisingly, Cameron is being accused of playing politics with his religion talk. Alaister Campbell, former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s communications man before Blair’s notorious embrace of faithiness after leaving office, says Cameron’s “religious ramblings” are a shallow political ploy. On his blog, Campbell asks, “how are we to believe Cameron believes it all when so recently he was twiddling the knobs on the radio trying to find his faith at al…
Read More…g from behind on same-sex marriage, by trumping the Bush administration on illegal-immigrant deportations and by expanding Bush’s N.S.A. surveillance program. As one 30-year-old libertarian senior staff member on the Hill told me: “I think we expected this sort of thing from Bush. But Obama seemed to be hip and in touch with my generation, and then he goes and reads our emails. Chait disputes the facts and figures very persuasively. But Draper cou…
Read More
…e their share of official hate-mongering. So has the United States’ principal ally in the Middle East, Israel. As David Sheen has noted in these pages, none other than the former Chief Rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yosef, invoked biblical passages to call for the eradication of Palestinians. Far from being an isolated outburst, Sheen observes that other senior rabbis have done likewise, routinely drawing on a confessional vocabulary of wholesale destruc…
Read More…another manifestation of the cookie-cutter cult leader. This narrative appeals to readers because it allows us to congratulate ourselves on being smarter than the avaricious, mad, and racist cult leader and his/her duped followers. But while this may feel good, it is intellectually lazy. To actively promote social justice in a religiously plural society, it is not enough to simply sort other people’s worldviews into the categories of good and evil…
Read More
…wald’s Small Crucifixion (early 16th century) in the publicly funded National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Grünewald’s great altarpiece in Colmar, France, is much better known, but the Small Crucifixion gives that same putrid body, those same mangled limbs, pocked skin oozing pus and blood. That Christ on the cross is actually dead, and the body so dead that ants might eat it, is both the most orthodox Christian statement, and the most scandal…
Read More…used for a range of things one of which is contraception”? How does “This bill is legal tender for all debts, public and private” NOT amount to “By law, this piece of paper can be used for a range of things, one of which is contraception”? Yes, US dollars have a bigger list of things they can be used for than do health plans, but both include contraception. So is the salient difference the size of the list? Is there some number of things-this-pape…
Read More…ords and bad words and sublime and despairing logics (and the Kardashians, alas) all spun together. And it is here that we address the dead in plaintive tones. In the book, a grieving Hazel reads the memorial posts on Augustus’ “wall page.” She is both horrified by and empathetic towards the endless tributes. Giving in to temptation, she replies to one post, but is never answered, “lost in the blizzard of new posts,” and realizes that Van Houten w…
Read More…prisingly, Cameron is being accused of playing politics with his religion talk. Alaister Campbell, former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s communications man before Blair’s notorious embrace of faithiness after leaving office, says Cameron’s “religious ramblings” are a shallow political ploy. On his blog, Campbell asks, “how are we to believe Cameron believes it all when so recently he was twiddling the knobs on the radio trying to find his faith at al…
Read More…same-sex couples have married since last July, but Colombian Attorney General Alejandro Ordóñez Maldonado and social conservatives have sought to challenge them.” Mexico: Coahuila Approves Marriage; Supreme Court Adopts Human Rights Protocol The state legislature of Coahuila, which borders the U.S., voted overwhelmingly on September 1 to legalize marriage by same-sex couples. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has congratulated…
Read More