Religion Dispatches
…a stranger was a sin. Now conservative Christian political interests have modified their position: anonymous government employees are allowed to look, to violate your embodiment theology. As the man’s latex-gloved hands reach for my crotch, Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” wafts from a shop at the bottom of the escalator. The irony is so thick I’d be able to feel it if this guy’s hands weren’t inside my waistband. Embodiment is a theolog…
Read More
…nsions of religion, Maher shows that he’s actually one of those beings who most likely will be outmoded in the near future: a mind-body dualist; someone who still believes in beliefs and ignores the realities of lived religion as experienced through the body via rituals, practices, storytelling, and symbols. Religion is ultimately not about talking heads around a Real Time table, nor can it be represented as such. Maher’s Freud-like, humorless scr…
Read More
…she isn’t real. She’s a projection of the imagination of her time—an earth mother moving through an idealized natural world. In another era, this might be a poem by Shelly or Keats. And that’s where the layers of criticism come up against the thing about the Dead that makes picking them apart often a losing challenge. The Dead were a fantasy. They were an escape from the harsher realities of their time. They kept playing through the ugly parts of…
Read More…el Lavers: Javier Soto, a pastor from the resort city of Viña del Mar, is among the most outspoken critics of the expansion of relationship recognition and other rights to LGBT Chileans. He said God sparked a massive forest fire in the coastal city of Valparaíso last April because lawmakers were considering the civil unions measure. Soto frequently confronts Rolando Jiménez, president of the Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation. The…
Read More
…ecause condoms make baby Jesus sad. In Utah, 45% of homeless teenagers are Mormons. Female genital mutilation. A famous comic book artist she knows was told that he wouldn’t be able to draw in heaven. “I’ve touched on 1/100 of the things about religion that piss me off,” Christina says. (I wonder if she’s pissed off to have the last name Christina; that would make me very angry if I were her.) “The things that make religion unique are the things…
Read More
…it below the viewership for the Super Bowl. As to causes of decline, if we move to the margins of demonic institutions does this slow it down or speed it up? He calls for greater vitality on the left, and I agree that this is better than steering right or being tepid—but at best what has happened on this front has been a wash for liberal Protestants in institutional terms. As I’ve argued before, amid decline from birthrates, leftward moves (not le…
Read More
…was caught after the murder, fleeing halfway across the state, he had the phone number of an Operation Rescue leader on his dashboard—the tip of the iceberg in terms of the broader connections he’d built with anti-abortion extremists. The church, Roeder would later testify, emerged as the only place he could find a shot at Tiller, around the elaborate security measures the doctor had learned to follow at his clinic and home. “Justifiable homicide…
Read More
…pushed the most desperate of these immigrants to take their chances on the more remote areas of the Arizona mountains and deserts. Which is why, Father David and Millsap believe, the number of deaths have climbed this past year. Many of the bodies are too decomposed or mutilated by animals to ever be identified. Kat Rodriguez of Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, a nonprofit advocacy organization which collects data on the deaths, says she gets calls…
Read More…e him credit: the man has balls to say this. Yes, fracking gives Americans more cheap carbon energy—for a while. And then we’re left with ruined landscapes, ruined aquifers, and our same old dependence on foreign energy sources, having failed to turn to renewables while mindlessly pumping more cheap petroleum into our veins. Like other critics of the new encyclical, Brooks chalks up the pope’s hostility to capitalism as the product of naivete or p…
Read More…t’s put that cheap argument to bed. At Patheos, Benjamin Corey shakes that cheap argument awake: Can we stop complaining about this bogus idea that American Christians are persecuted now? I mean, really. Can we stop? The world needs us to turn from ourselves and focus on this real persecution, because it’s evil and must be exposed and stopped. However, our own self-centeredness as Americans is getting in the way of the discussion on real anti-Chri…
Read More