Religion Dispatches
…e more productive conversation among students and leaders of science and religion around the many profound issues in our nation that engage both: abortion, medical care, stem cells, homosexuality, and genomic research. The battle rhetoric would fade and, more than likely, movies like Expelled wouldn’t be made in the first place. We’d be less about selling books and tickets and more about moving forward….
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…ople. And our god is that God: the one who makes water flow from the rock (Numbers 20:11); who surprises us all the time by blessing us in the least likely circumstances. Mr. President: You need to understand this. You need to work with this, but very, very carefully. Because, like it or not, the endgame in this election is going to be about which candidate does religion better, I fervently wish that Mr. Obama would say a bit more about the proble…
Read More…e thrown in Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Eliot Spitzer endorsing the sentiments behind the Occupy movement; ergo, the three of them must hate the Jews too. This, of course, is ridiculous. As everybody should know by now, Occupy is a leaderless, open-source movement. That means, unfortunately, that the nuts have free rein. When I last visited Occupy Wall Street, there was indeed a concatenation of weirdos, from Old Left grandmas to anarcho-synd…
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…er powers are guiding the speeches of the lawyers for the other side when, time after time, they make mistakes in what they say and call us the “injured parties”. Almost all the lawyers are doing it, including Lawyer Pavlova who is very negatively disposed towards us. Nevertheless, some higher powers are causing her to say “the injured parties” about us rather than the people she’s defending, us. I wouldn’t give people labels. I don’t think there…
Read More…o be explained. Jumping the gun, or perhaps the shark, writers from the LA Times, USA Today, NY Times, and many other major outlets have already weighed in, well before the finale sinks in. What then am I offering in the midst of the hullabaloo? Why write before it is over? Why write at all? Because the ultimate response to the show’s questions have already been answered. The ending of the finale is (spoiler alert) not important. There are no answ…
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…Prison Fellowship and Watergate felon Religion or Politics? It’s come up a number of times both in the book and in this roundtable; whether The Family is a religious or a political movement; “a political theology”? Randy wrote that: “The author parses this group as a political movement, but that scheme… doesn’t hold. What if he looked at The Family as a religious movement instead, as I think it is?” Jeff just said of the media: “There’s a sense he…
Read More…e list of registrants at The Response to United in Purpose, writing at the time that “research has shown that it takes only 5 million voters to influence the outcome of an election. This is a do-able goal, and Champion the Vote is seeking Champions—an army of volunteers—to help with the effort. A Champion is simply a Christian talking to other Christians about registering and voting.” Stemberger has been involved in the United in Purpose events, t…
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…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…
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…items within their borders (as is already the case federally with lottery tickets). A Republican-controlled Congress could then impose a nationwide ban on the mailing of abortion pills or certain contraceptives. (Republican-controlled state legislatures have already demonstrated a willingness to enact questionable legislation for nothing more than its intimidation factor.) Which brings us back to Anthony Comstock. In 1878, the Supreme Court uphel…
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…he world. I am a part of the world.” After watching the movie for a second time, Chassé came away with more questions than she had originally—only this time, her questions were more nuanced. She wants to read Barack Obama’s book, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, which is frequently referenced in the movie. She really wants to read George Obama’s book, Homeland: An Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival. She’d like to under…
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