Religion Dispatches
…erstand how and why it happened. But while concerns over environmental degradation and the billions in lost revenue occupy much of the news, the question of responsibility remains central. And who is responsible? Who is to blame? Unfortunately, the two most popular interpretations offer little help. They do, however, provide useful illustrations of the kind of thinking that helped create the crisis in the first place and they also suggest a deeper…
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…” those still in the industry. Lobért, a curvy peroxide blonde, has been unabashed in flaunting her God-given gifts to draw attention to her Vegas-based ministry, Hookers for Jesus. At the 2008 Adult Entertainment Expo, for example, a 40-year-old Lobért (dressed in a tight black tank top with strategically placed pink letters spelling “HOOKERS” above a silver ichthus) confronted some of the industry’s most renowned promoters alongside Heather Veit…
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…or what you did,” Jay Bakker told a group gathered in Durham, North Carolina a couple weeks ago. Bakker, pastor of the Brooklyn-based Revolution NYC, had traveled south to his home state—the state that, decades ago, witnessed firsthand the rise, and then the fall, of his televangelist parents’ PTL ministry—to speak out against a ballot initiative up for vote tomorrow. If passed, Amendment 1 would modify North Carolina’s constitution to declare “ma…
Read MoreWhat’s striking about the president’s pirouette on the ACA, and about Democratic disarray in the face of the renewed GOP assault in the House, is the absence of any open discourse on the underlying ethics of health care. I’ve heard just a few commentators say, and rather gingerly, “Ummm, if the young and healthy people don’t participate it kind of defeats the idea of how insurance works. Ummm, it’s like the kids need to pay a little more so other…
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…cloth over his head for an hour or more before he is allowed to see light again. It might be even harder to imagine Ben Franklin submitting to these indignities. Or George Washington. Or Theodore or Franklin Roosevelt. But all of them did, along with eleven other presidents, and a great many of the leading politicians, generals, artists, and scientists of this country and several others. And some of them have done even more outlandish things as p…
Read More…eptions. One is the Oriental Trading Company. Founded to create cheap plastic toys for carnivals, OTC is now a leading supplier of cheap plastic stuff for church groups and Christian schools. Their party supply catalog always contains a small section dedicated to Jesus merchandise, which results in some odd juxtapositions. Here, for example, are the current most popular category themes on the OTC website: …
Read MoreReflecting on the recent execution of 21 Coptic Christians by ISIS fanatics in Libya, Rod Dreher, writing at the American Conservative, calls the incident “a sobering reminder of what real persecution looks like.” Coming from Dreher, for whom the future of American Christianity looks increasingly ominous, the line is sobering in itself. But he goes on: Yet it is also the kind of thing that people in this country who fear and loathe Christians poi…
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…than theater and more sacred than peace, all the while inflicting as much damage as possible. The sum resources of a culture—its science, its religion, its poetry, its prejudice—mobilize in the service of that cause. These are as much the technologies of war as the weapons themselves. At least since Carl von Clausewitz first spoke of the “fog of war” (an inevitable unknowing that reigns over every battlefield), the challenge of warfare has been to…
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…eaties). This requires doing the careful work of listening to Cree, Anishinaabeg, and other Indigenous neighbours to figure out collectively how to live together after years of Canadian attempts to destroy Indigenous languages, families, and systems of governance. With this very fraught and lively discussion of questions of reconciliation and settler dispossession and violence dominating the news cycle, it was particularly surprising—even breathta…
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…guage that fits with easy calls for bipartisanship and unity. The main takeaway of his speech was that the United States is better than this, and that the nation needed to return to what it has always been—decent and honorable. This sentiment, of course, flies in the face of what we witnessed today: Twelve Republican senators and dozens of representatives (representing millions of American voters) objecting to Biden’s victory, denying that his ele…
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