Religion Dispatches
…e Rome, with its super-saturation of history. Things do not stand still or stay static. Things change. An Egyptian thing or a Gretomb may become a guard tower which may end up guarding a cemetery all over again. And tomorrow that same Pyramid will become the central symbol and staging area for an ancient-style Roman triumph celebrating a very modern kind of gay pride. And one day after that, some thousands of miles away, citizens in the United Sta…
Read More…ting wants to hear—the more he runs the very real risk of undercutting his strongest selling point. Senator Obama has a different, and I suppose a more difficult challenge. He needs to own his Liberal religious credentials and to explain why they are sensible. And he must do so in an increasingly “know-nothing” religious atmosphere. His most reasoned issues are taken as evidence that he’s had too much legal training and isn’t really religious. Mea…
Read More…fair share as well. The Greek Orthodox Church pays very low taxes on its vast real estate holdings and its clerics are paid by the state. That hand-in-glove relationship may be about to change. In an amazing development, the Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreiou, went to Mount Athos two days ago to meet with the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomaios, to discuss the decidedly un-spiritual matter of the Orthodox Church’s responsibilities in this ti…
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…aying or calling for prayer in times of tragedy seems to mark a kind of existential angst, sorrow, or confusion for which other words or gestures seem inadequate. Likewise, the impulse to pray holds a space that we may not even believe exists, giving us time to gather our less spiritually distracted wits about us. It is “true” in what it offers more than in what it is. This is at least something of how one woman I talked with recently put it. An a…
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…ife that are not to be explained by Deuteronomy; that much is clear. The most striking feature of the current controversy over the president’s speech concerns the invocation of the phrase “Judeo-Christian.” Our political values are not secular, it is said; they are grounded in a Judeo-Christian (not a Judeo-Christian-Muslim) morality and always have been. This is the perspective that regularly expresses itself as a desire to post the Ten Commandme…
Read More…mounts to much the same thing) away from becoming a millionaire. What is most striking about Laderman’s suggestion is that it helps us to see why the economic crisis is so shattering, and why the accountants are monitoring the returns so closely… Black Friday, Bruised Saturday, Cyber Monday. In short, if James Buchan is right and there is an implicit theology to this marketplace, then what we experienced in 2007 and 2008—and what we are still expe…
Read MoreIf we listen to some religious leaders, natural disasters don’t just happen—there is a supernatural reason for them. In short, God is angry, and natural disasters are God’s way of helping us to see the light and repent, repent, repent, before it’s too late. (Well, for those who survived the hurricane, or flood, or earthquake, anyway. For those who didn’t, it’s presumably, already too late.) Hurricanes like Katrina were blamed on gays and feminist…
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…n significance only to Easter. In Italian it is called Ferragosto, the August Festival. It is the feast of the assumption of a woman who is still remembered somewhat ironically as “the Virgin.” Of all the trappings of medieval Christendom with which the Protestant Reformers dispensed, none were erased in more thoroughgoing fashion than the celebration of the emphatically bodily femininity of Jesus’ mother. The Most Intense Kind of Poetry Just as s…
Read More…are the only ones who recognize them as canonical. Point Two: Fundamentalist Baptists are in the vanguard of Christian groups who clearly believe that Mormonism is heterodoxy, or more to the point, heresy. They decidedly do not recognize the authority of the Qur’an or the Book of Mormon, and vigorously object to any attempt to tie the New Testament to either. What is striking, given this clear division, is how Romney and Huckabee both fell back o…
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…d complicated affair. Herbalife’s travails started in 2012, when the activist investor Bill Ackman took on a one billion dollar short on Herbalife, betting that their stock would tank. Then he set about trying to destroy the company. Ackman made an Herbalife takedown website, supported anti-Herbalife groups, and managed to get the FTC to open an investigation into Herbalife’s sales model in 2014. It may have been all for naught. The conflict surfa…
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