Religion Dispatches
…American psyche can in some small way be healed, and that we should refuse to give up on the notion that American culture is at its most vibrant in those rare moments when the best of the liberal and the best of the conservative traditions converge. I had forgotten just how perilous those ideas can be….
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…of the first design contests he held. He asked people to come up with the best design possible for a mobile AIDS clinic for a town in a country in Africa. He posted the deadline, and he waited. He didn’t think anyone would submit anything, but on the day of the contest’s deadline, a delivery man from Federal Express rang the doorbell to his tiny studio apartment in New York City. He was carrying a huge bag stuffed with envelopes. “Wow,” the found…
Read More…ng the hypocrisy of his words. Daly, similarly, did what he and Focus does best—not getting that the message they’re putting out starkly reveals their own hypocrisy. For example, Bush tells Daly: “I don’t believe you can lead by demonizing somebody. I believe you lead by convincing somebody,” he says. “And in my case, I was unable to convince (some people) on different issues. I understood that.” Here’s where tears of frustration begin. While Daly…
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…ographs taken at Abu Graib… In short, the camera is not best suited to the presentation of Hamlet’s great soliloquies. “Such stuff as dreams are made of” do not have exhibition value, and neither do ghosts. But corpses do. So the images that stick best to the celluloid are Ophelia’s corpse floating on water, or Hamlet’s corpse, dominating the stage in death. And that is why they stick best to the Modern memory as well. Ironically, what is missing…
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…g; even if it may not serve our interests in the short run, it’s still the best alternative human beings have come up with. In this case, one can certainly understand Netanyahu’s concern; Mubarak is “the devil he knows.” But it’s often the case that autocratic rulers are easier to deal with since they typically answer to no one. Yet, while they appear more stable in the short run, more dictatorships have been overthrown by democratic movements tha…
Read More…thingy … totally disgusted me. (That purity vow was a godsend!) I tried my best to be straight. I had the best of training. My parents were both straight. My brothers and sisters were all straight. It wasn’t until adulthood that I found out I had a lesbian cousin. As far as I knew, I came completely from straight stock. I simply had to be straight, right? Well, not so much. At the age of 16, I uttered those dreaded words, “I am a lesbian.” The fac…
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…eternal destiny.” Banana, Proof of God’s Existence Comfort is a man whose best-known evolutionary criticism is the banana (or “the atheist’s nightmare,” as he calls it), which he says proves God’s existence because of its intelligently-designed appearance. In an unintentionally funny video from 2006, he expounds on the brilliant design of the banana, as a most impressed Kirk Cameron looks on. That Comfort is so lacking in imagination that he can’…
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…way, we cannot avoid believing in stories. We can only hope to choose the best ones. How to do this? I propose that good stories are stories that tell the truth, and bad ones are ones that do not. I fear that I may have lost some of you just now. In particular, most atheists I know would be quite critical of the idea that stories are related in any meaningful way to the bedrock truth about the world. So in the interest of keeping everyone on the…
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…outside the formal worship site. “It’s about, you know, help me to be the best Christian, the best person I can be in my conversations, my communications,” the Rev. Lisa Vaughn explained to a reporter from the Globe and Mail. In this regard, Vaughn has made two important gestures toward religious relevancy for Millennials and Gen-Xers. First, she hands over the goods of the church (the blessing) for the enrichment of the spirituality of daily lif…
Read More…rnment is the decentralization of authority into the distinct spheres; the best check on the depravity of human beings in the economy is the decentralization of the market created by competition. But this is nothing like John Calvin’s own thinking. Despite his love of freedom, Calvin also had what we might call “Talibanesque” tendencies, since he believed in the sovereignty of God and the total depravity of humankind; humans are so sinful that eve…
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