Religion Dispatches
…in Paris last year filmed the attack on a GoPro camera (in that light, the company’s slogan, Be a HERO, seems chilling). It would be wrong to ignore these shooters—their acts have enormous consequences—but you feel complicit, somehow, when you pay attention to them, too. In Reno, Clinton may have made a sharp political calculation. As William Saletan argues, the candidate seems to be pushing establishment Republicans to exit Trump’s orbit, and off…
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…o revive FADA in 2017. A spokesman for Sen. Mike Lee, a key sponsor of the companion legislation in the Senate, told BuzzFeed News that Lee expects to reintroduce the bill under President Trump, specifically pointing to the incoming administration’s expected sympathy to anti-LGBT “religious freedom” arguments. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, another co-sponsor and former presidential opponent of Trump, likewise told BuzzFeed that “any effort to protect relig…
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…ying to reach friends and calls kept going to voicemail. Around 3AM at the command post, one of the battalion commanders asked Landeza if he was hearing what they were hearing: “there could be up to 100 people in there.” Because fire departments are often the first on site at a disaster area, people like Landeza are trained to be prepared. Landeza said, for example, that the first responders at the Oakland fire had blankets but no water, and as a…
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…ld. In the past decade, the Roman Catholic clergy abuse, News of the World phone-hacking, and Wikileaks scandals have marked new, and only very incompletely explored, ethical territory as we sort out the best ways to balance personal privacy and public safety as these are impacted by our engagement with new media. But even given difficulties defining necessary and appropriate boundaries of personal, professional, and institutional transparency, we…
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…religion, and lack of acceptance for who they were or who they wanted to become in their religious communities. Religious immersion The ‘exiters’ I interviewed described their experience in religion as immersive, consisting of a significant time commitment, a high degree of participation, and intense involvement. Heather, a 29-year-old female exiter of evangelical Christianity, explains her religious experience as deeply connected to family and fr…
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…Call your representatives now, and again in January, and every time the incoming administration tries to trample the progress we’ve made over the past eight years. Take to the streets for those who cannot, and, perhaps most crucially, talk to the white people and Trump supporters in your life about why they voted for him, and what they hope will come of his election. Then point out the evidence—that’s piling up already—suggesting they’ve been dup…
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…Others live with a sense of impending doom. The anti-Clinton activists welcome this outcome as a much-needed awakening that will finally mobilize Muslims to forcefully resist the bipartisan establishment. How Muslims and other US minorities will handle the coming damage remains to be seen. What is abundantly clear is that Islamophobia is now validated like never before. While it has long had a place in bipartisan politics and policy, its unpreced…
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…is an ongoing and active relationship between the living and the dead. The communion of saints is a community which includes both living and dead people. Since they are still important members of the community in order to “get together” with our dead friends and relatives, we need a place to meet them. For this reason, according to the Church, the person’s body should not be dissolved in the ocean or scattered in a National Park. On the Day of the…
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…ry strong. Already in early Christianity, there’s a sense in which the overcoming of Judaism…is one way of representing what it means to become a true follower of Jesus. The same happens in early Islam, in which both one of the first things Mohammed really has to do in order to prove that he’s a prophet is overcome the Jews. Those early religious bases of a lot of modern culture place the overcoming of Judaism at the center of what it means to cre…
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…When I asked him about that he acknowledged that we all have to choose our compromises. In the book you explore a number of social domains—diet, birth control, parenting, economics, alternative medicine—where what’s “natural” is considered to be what’s best, and then you unspool them to show that the natural/unnatural divide was never really that coherent in the first place. Did any of your case studies surprise you? One of my favorite examples wh…
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