Religion Dispatches
…ad through. To be merciful with our aging is like Allah’s mercy with those parents: it’s a part of the Divine nature and I am grateful. Finally, and of course unique for this year, I learned that it is possible to blog your way through Ramadan, sharing many ideas along the way, and yet still keep some things between you and Allah alone. The idea to do this one hundred-day blog came to me on my recent return from Indonesia. While there, my friends…
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…p the interactive nature of new digital media, which invites both vertical participation between traditionally authoritative sources (like clergy) and laypeople of all ages and horizontal participation across affiliated sectors (such as young adults, Gen-Xers, and so on). Once the novelty of the new church toy wears thin, the falseness of its claim to cultural relevancy is revealed. An MP3 player loaded by the pastor is just a weird grownup’s mix…
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…Mennonite tradition of Yoder, it is to some extent a withdrawal: we don’t participate in the political process. I understand, you maintain another kind of presence, but yeah. Dan: On a certain level Yoder, of course, would not have been very interested in that question at all. He’d just say, “Well Mennonites do what Mennonites do, whether that’s a withdrawal or an alternative witness doesn’t make any difference.” How do we find that kind of coven…
Read More…n the yard out front. Perhaps what I am feeling is a loss from all this company celebrating this time with the Queen. She has not yet departed after all, and we are still honored by her visit. Perhaps it is the deafening silence of being so removed from the hustle and bustle of the cities and even from my own family that makes me feel a bit melancholy. I should probably catch ride outside the gates of the estate where I can have bars for my cell p…
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…and then subsequently read the book, I had a long discussion with a Jewish participant. We were not comfortable with our perception that the Christian paradigm of forgiveness did not seem to require any expiation. We were doubtful that forgiveness and reconciliation could occur just on the part of some benevolence from the one(s) offended. We were not sure that you could just “overcome them with our capacity to forgive.” So I listened to her, disc…
Read More…at cross purposes. My first thought was to kick myself for leaving my cell phone behind. This would have made a terrific picture. My second thought was to find a less obtrusive spot where I could watch to see how this excruciatingly slow drama would play out. But before I could move, my husband drifted up behind me in his kayak, took one look at the frog and snake and muttered, “I can’t take this.” Over my objections (“But it’s nature!”) Jeff stre…
Read More…ld be delivered, via text messaging starting Thursday, to every registered Republican or non-aligned Iowa voter with a cell phone on record. . . . The video’s star is Molotov Mitchell, whom Cary K. Gordon, president of PeaceMakers Institute and pastor of Sioux City’s Cornerstone Church, calls “the guerilla warrior of Judeo-Christian political commentary.” Mitchell is an edgy independent filmmaker whose Illuminati Pictures delivers something akin…
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…ed bishop was part of that ceremony. Bishop Carcaño did not feel she could participate in the CWAC ordinations in her region. She was involved in discussion about whether a local church could be used for the service and whether local clergy ought to participate. There are differing perceptions about whether she instructed local pastors not to allow the ordination service to be held in local churches. It is hard to know all that went on behind the…
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…students’ papers who give me guided tours of the Roman Road in 2.5 double-spaced pages of eighteen-year-old certainty parroting their parents and their youth pastors, and I know they are “giving testimony” in these papers, a light in the darkness, planting seed that will either spring up or it won’t, but they at least they have done their part to reach the apparently pagan professor. And I do hear His voice sometimes. Really, I do. And, my dear be…
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Oklahoma Republican Senators pass legislation that could hurt cops, doctors, parents, sick women and rape victims… and which might have been offered in bad faith to begin with. The Oklahoma senate has overwhelmingly supported a “fetal personhood” bill, SB-1433, authored by Republican Brian Crain of Tulsa. This law would grant all legal “rights, privileges and immunities” to fetuses at “every stage of development.” The bill contains no provision f…
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