Religion Dispatches
…ttolica (non-Catholic) cemetery was built. At the Pyramid. It’s one of the most peaceful spots in Rome today, famous in part for the number of famous poets and visual artists who have found their final rest here. Keats is buried here; so is Shelley. Both men are buried next to close male companions of the road who poignantly elected to spend their eternities very far from home, but in the material proximity of their friends’ earthly remains. It is…
Read More…Arizona is a man of character, whatever that means, and a man of principle—most of the time. But his recent decision to utilize attack ads, and his willingness to kow-tow to an evangelical script runs the very real risk of derailing the very thing that had made his candidacy viable to begin with: his maverick status and his straight talk. The more he begins to sound and to look like Mitt Romney—saying what he believes the base he is courting wants…
Read More…ves to date have been limited to ensuring that the troubled European banks most heavily implicated in bad Greek debt get repaid. Their shocking austerity measures—pensions cut in half, retirement age increased, huge cuts in social programs, education and health care, and crushing unemployment as the inevitable result—have been designed to help Northern European banks, no matter the cost to the Greek people. More recently, street protests, nationwi…
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…ousand “likes,” has been far more limited. Some visitors to the page—which mostly features gory news photos and aggressive demands that visitors “like” photos (“Like this or you are completely heartless”) and calls for prayer—complained that the page was a craven attempt to gather followers in a time of tragedy. That may well be. But it also seems that thousands of prayers, calls for prayer, prayer icons, and so on floating around the social media…
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…Reformation and over one hundred years of bloody inter-Christian conflict, most everyone understood that these in-house debates would not be resolved with further debate; the ideas by then were simply too entrenched. So a new political idea was born, that of secular politics. If we cannot achieve clarity on the truth of competing religious claims, then perhaps we can agree on the proper place of religion in modern political systems. And if we wish…
Read More…an’s piece, The Economy is Sacred, Stupid, on the essential religiosity of most Americans’ commitment to a free market economy, captures the essence of what his scholarship has done so creatively over many years. It takes the form of a brilliant thought-experiment: what happens if we shift from the language of religion, or faith, to the language of sacrality and the sacred? What happens, he contends, is that we suddenly notice the spiritual dimens…
Read More…. Some might say that God is sending a landslide to get Ugandan leaders to move faster to kill off their gay and lesbian citizens. Both reasons are ludicrous. What caused the landslide was no mystery: Rains that began Monday evening continued through the night, triggering landslides in the Bududa region, 170 miles east of Kampala. Couple that bit of meteorological fact with the geological fact that the area is prone to landslides and you get the o…
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The middle of August symbolizes the beginning of the end of summer to most persons in culturally Protestant America. Children are returning to school; adults are returning to work. Summer vacation is coming to an end. It s a slightly different story in much of Europe, where August—the entire month—is still devoted to vacation. August 15, the very middle of this most languid of summer months (the one that takes its name from a legendary Roman empe…
Read More…ntless insertion of religion into our public political life hurts religion most of all. It speaks to the sheer vacuousness of most (though certainly not all) political appeals to religion, which have been permitted to go almo*]}*st unchallenged, ever since Reagan’s explicit coddling of a self-professed moral majority, and the post-Clinton swerve to the center, with its clear implication that nervous Democratic candidates had better be biblically liter…
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…e makes shakes, protein bars, vitamins, tea concentrates, and supplements, mostly focused on weight loss and muscle gain. Instead of marketing directly to customers, the company bundles its products and sells them to individual distributors, called Members, who then turn around and sell them to friends, relatives, strangers—whoever they can find. For the past couple years, Herbalife has been trying to convince the Federal Trade Commission that thi…
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