Search Results for:

VIPREG2024 1xbet apk promo code New Zealand

Holey Holey Holey: The Problem with a New Study Valuing Religion at $1.2 Trillion Per Year

…ry becomes even murkier. Take Trijicon, for example, chosen from a Deseret News listicle, “20 companies with religious roots.” Deseret News included Trijicon in the list because the company “inscribed coded biblical references on high-powered rifle sights used by the U.S. military.” That’s it. Other than the founder’s purported religious beliefs, its inclusion is arbitrary. Why not include Ebay, whose founder Pierre Omidyar is a Buddhist, or any o…

Read More

Glenn Beck Hijacks It’s a Wonderful Life

…nd active commitment to “social justice,” something that Beck has said are code words for Communism and Nazism. Look, Frank Capra wasn’t exactly known for his subtle messages. Yet, somehow, Beck manages to reinterpret the movie through an unregulated free-market ideological Ayn Rand prism and message of Christian conservatism. For real? Either Beck has never watched the movie, or he’s so conservatively deluded that he thinks Mr. Potter is the hero…

Read More

Satan, Contributor to Teen Vogue‘s New “Sodomy” Section?

…hard-hearted pride (see Ezekiel 16:49-50). It’s also notable that the one New Testament passage that speaks most graphically about male-male sex (Romans 1:27) makes no reference to Sodom. For the theological definition of “sodomy,” we have to jump to medieval Rome and Peter Damian, fierce monk and sometimes cardinal. He defines four varieties of a sexual sin that he names “sodomy.” The varieties are (in modern terminology): male masturbation, mut…

Read More

Why White Women Are Leading Defenders of Kavanaugh

…e been buttressed by female voices. For the past 24 hours, the major cable news networks have pumped up air time of pro-Kavanaugh ads produced by the conservative Judicial Crisis Network (which is, coincidentally enough, run by Carrie Severino, a form clerk for Clarence Thomas). The most prominent ad features a respectable white woman waxing about how upstanding and morally unimpeachable Kavanaugh is. The not so subtle implication is that Kavanaug…

Read More

Rome vs. the Sisters

…ns of sisters dedicated to serving the needs of the sick and the poor, the new Vatican Code of Canon Law cloistered them all, imposing rigid rules that undercut their ministries. As the century moved on, however, relations between the Vatican and the sisters seemed to improve. In its effort to respond to the horrors of the twentieth century, the Vatican ordered the sisters to become better educated, to update their rules and habits, and to begin m…

Read More

Francis the Jesuit: a Philosopher-Pope?

…ot points out, philosophy in the ancient world was not so much a system or code as “a way of being.” Philosophy, in this sense, is enmeshed in a life-world. Writers from Marcus Aurelius to Francis Bacon to Ralph Waldo Emerson have conducted such experiments in living as spiritual exercise, a task that entailed writing as philosophic engagement. Philosophy in this mode, Hadot explains, is a continuous process, to be renewed in each instant—a practi…

Read More

Is Army’s New “Humanist” Designation Just Semantic Hooey?

…aplaincy for service members with non-religious beliefs and practices. The new faith code is significant in a number of ways. First, for Bradley and Humanist service members, it means that their existential disposition and associated practices are designated in their military records with language not shaped primarily in opposition to traditional religious designations. “‘Atheist’ says only what I’m not,” Bradley explained. “‘Humanist is what I am…

Read More

Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

…hing the sins of a lost city, some prescriptions in the Israelite holiness code, and the Apostle Paul on the consequences of pagan idolatry. Or so the passages read to me.) Calling out the numbers is not meant to start a conversation about what these biblical passages might mean—or about how different Christian communities have decided to determine the applied meaning of any verse in their version of the Bible. The verses are often cited in church…

Read More

‘I Don’t Buy It’: The Gospel According to Frank Underwood

…and addresses us, the television audience: Truth be told, I never really knew him or what his dreams were. He was quiet, timid, almost invisible. My mother didn’t think much of him. My mother’s mother hated him. The man never scratched the surface of life. Maybe it’s best he died so young. He wasn’t doing much but taking up space. But that doesn’t make for a very powerful eulogy, now, does it? Like so many politicians, Frank uses faith as a ploy…

Read More

One of These Things is Not Like the Other: Religion and the Obama Campaign

…dency, signaling the possibility of different coalitions, the emergence of new and different “religious” issues, and different ways of imagining the relationship between religion and politics in the United States. In short, religion no longer “belongs” to the political right (if it ever really did—Waldman was right about that), but it is a matter worth puzzling over, this question of the Illinois Senator’s religiosity, the question of why the only…

Read More