Religion Dispatches
…ement on the group’s Italian-language website declared, “Anonymous decided today to besiege your site in response to the doctrine, to the liturgies, to the absurd and anachronistic concepts that your for-profit organization spreads around the world.” The statement alluded to the burning of heretics, the repression of Galileo, the genocide of Native Americans, aiding Nazi fugitives, and the more recent sexual abuse scandal. Anonymous members attemp…
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…it’s about how you look? About the actual color of your skin? So most Jews today are ‘white’ & have ‘white privilege’ but some don’t? Who decides? Are Stephen Spielberg & Woody Allen not white? My point is that these identities only seem to apply when woke people say they do.” Metaxas, making very little sense here, is clearly attempting to wiggle out of the mess he’s gotten himself in. Perhaps the best response to this tweet comes from another RD…
Read More…us confess we are addicted to fossil fuels and will use some to go to work today or to cook our food today or to warm our homes today, it is a good day to pray. Like that drink you can’t stop drinking, we are stuck in an addictive pattern. We are morally compromised, to put it mildly. Yesterday it looked like 1.5° C (about 3°F) was going to be the direction for COP21’s final objective (“1.5 and stay alive,” goes the slogan) or at the very least “l…
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…sagree with.” But that wasn’t even the clearest signal the high court gave today that it’s ready to reconsider the weight granted to legal claims of “religious freedom.” In a not-unexpected decision issued today in favor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbus, Missouri, seven justices concluded that a state program that reimbursed organizations which used scrap tire rubber to resurface playgrounds, but denied those grants to religious institutions…
Read More…ting that “[n]one of the history Marsh cited—and none the majority details today—supports calling on citizens to pray, in a manner consonant with only a single religion’s beliefs, at a participatory public proceeding, having both legislative and adjudicatory components.” Unlike a state legislative session, town board meetings “both by design and in operation, allow citizens to actively participate in the Town’s governance—sharing concerns, airing…
Read More…ent in a country like Egypt was rare and a far cry from the pandemic it is today with a <90% hijab rate among Muslims. People who know women from these cultures today understand the tremendous pressure all Muslim women can be under to veil. The pressure can be so severe that one does have to problematize notions of “choice” in some contexts. – In view of this last point: something happened to change these societies. Leila Ahmed’s A Quiet Revolutio…
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…led for Anchorage, Alaska for the weekend of September 13, which was being promoted by Wasilla Bible Church, the home church of Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP’s nominee vice presidential nominee. According to piece by Wayne Beson, the executive director of Truth Wins Out, that appeared in the Falls Church News-Press Online, Wasilla Bible Church “was caught promoting” the LWO conference through a Bible insert that read, “You’ll be encouraged by the powe…
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…but what we have here, mostly, is a particular aesthetic (“The TED talk is today a sentimental form,” Nathan Heller writes in The New Yorker). Wright describes this aesthetic in frankly spiritual terms. TED talks, he told me, are in keeping with “a kind of civic religion of aspiration and self-reliance and communal progress.” When I brought up this hope-and-progress energy with Vanderbilt historian Paul Stob, a scholar of intellectual culture, he…
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…g the 1912 “Men and Religion Forward” movement—a national revival aimed at promoting the kingdom—Hobson shared the stage of the Brooklyn Tabernacle with Booker T. Washington and claimed that African Americans would degenerate into cannibals if they were permitted to drink alcohol. Christians, he felt, needed to lead the world toward sobriety through law, through example, and through education. Hobson’s take on drugs was quite similar. After Prohib…
Read More…ecarity with respect to the law. What is incumbent on religious protesters today is not just to fill up the jails, but to multiply. The Berrigans created their audience by being paid attention. And this is what religious protesters are doing brilliantly today: in protests, online, in their communities, even in their classrooms. The strategies are many, but the goals can only be achieved if attention increases. If movements form, rather than occasi…
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