Religion Dispatches
…husband Lou, seventy-three, began giving serious thought to their funeral plans. “Cremation makes sense to me,” explains Lou. “We don’t want to be a burden to anyone—our family or our planet—after we’re gone. Cremation is the right thing for us to do.” If cremation is widely reinterpreted in the way the Winters have—that is, as a mitzvah, a good deed—then perhaps it is the religion’s normative practices, and not cremation, that are problematic. Ra…
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…ionships between individuals, but is more easily disseminated to a greater number of people. We experience AI as a crisis because, like the rabbis of the Talmud, we actually have conflicting needs and desires. We crave the efficiency of AI because it can save time and effort, helping us write emails, make phone calls, and recall and summarize information. At the same time, we’re seeking human connection when we do reach out, and AI fails to provid…
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…ion and $400,000 from James Dobson’s Focus on the Family] budget and have plans for special offerings to be taken in churches around the country.” The Yes on Prop 8 campaign plans “precinct-by-precinct organizing and deploying thousands of volunteers to identifying and turn out voters [and it] … includes rallies, a ‘Stand for Marriage Sunday’ on September 21 and a ‘family voting weekend’ on October 18 and 19, when people will be encourage to vot…
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…(“You shall not pollute the land wherein you are; for blood it defiles the land; and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it. Defile not therefore the land, which you shall inhabit.”) This means, Mattera insists, that God will require the death of millions of American to “repent” for legal abortion. “[I]f America does not repent of this hideous sin then for every single baby legally abort…
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…become the latest “sinful” activity. Perhaps Rev. Miller should get on the phone to Sarah Palin, and counsel her about her kids’ activity on Facebook. Bristol Palin found time from her “Dancing with the stars” practice to get on Facebook with her sister Willow to ride on a friend who had the chutzpah to say “Sarah Palin’s Alaska is failing so hard right now.” Willow’s response was to call the poster a gay slur, and Bristol jumping in the fray to r…
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…urious about what ever happened to the “home for babies” and the adoption plans Clinton described. Belz found that it had closed years ago, and that the nuns who’d staffed it wouldn’t talk to the press. According to a pastor at the church next door to the home’s former location, the adoption ministry failed to take off because the Roman Catholic nuns who ran it weren’t allowed to care for babies without medical personnel on site. “I’m not sure the…
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…gushing waterfall, some of which seemed to be making its way through to my phone. I received a swarm of text messages and emails from different people I know across the country, arriving almost simultaneously: This is the best moment in my lifetime, politically. Shout out to the ancestors who r rejoicing with us 2night! Oh yeah. President Obama! A new day is on the way! Yes GOD can! Yes we can! They didn’t want to give us 40 acres and a mule so da…
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…o the plaza during the eight o’clock hour, seemingly timed to prevent the planned nine o’clock march, making several arrests. They were hugely disruptive and rather violent. But the march went on. I looked at my cell phone when it started and saw that it was nine on the dot. I don’t recall the occupiers ever doing anything quite so on time. AB: Last comment. I think these are all process theologians in the making. What I mean by that is, they are…
Read More…sday, 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 to an animated political cartoon weekly at WorldN…
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…nts Reform Judaism; Muslims and other non-Christian groups arrive in large numbers. But this is primarily a story of how religion has interacted with some of the big events of American history. American religious expression—its music and art, its stories of internal spiritual quests, its embodiment, its wild profusion of utopian groups, its history of ritual practices—will have to be found elsewhere. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. God…
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