Religion Dispatches
…never be discovered embezzling money, enjoying kinky sex, or (The Da Vinci Code notwithstanding) fathering surprise children. It’s not necessary to label something a “cult” to understand the potential peril involved in looking to a living guru. However honest and virtuous that guru might be, she—like the rest of us—is susceptible to tripping and falling right up until the day she dies. What makes some folks willing and able to trust in a charismat…
Read More…uld have created a national gun registry. From Jennifer Steinhauser at the New York Times this morning: As for the N.R.A., while some saw the group’s leader, Wayne LaPierre, as meandering and on defense after the Connecticut school shootings in December, seasoned lawmakers heard something far more telling: the group, which once supported new background checks, would no longer abide them. As a result, before a single hearing, bill or speech on the…
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…ot points out, philosophy in the ancient world was not so much a system or code as “a way of being.” Philosophy, in this sense, is enmeshed in a life-world. Writers from Marcus Aurelius to Francis Bacon to Ralph Waldo Emerson have conducted such experiments in living as spiritual exercise, a task that entailed writing as philosophic engagement. Philosophy in this mode, Hadot explains, is a continuous process, to be renewed in each instant—a practi…
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…c, Burkhart seems conscious of the thin line she treads as the face of the new facility—appealing to the better nature of a Wichita community that many abortion rights activists blame for enabling Tiller’s death. She sets her jaw as she runs quickly through the list of groups opposed to the clinic, hurrying to get to the Kansas she’d prefer to discuss: the one with a progressive history as a free state—eventually—during the Civil War, that support…
Read More…he whole thing here. If you’re like me, you’ll applaud and resolve to be a better and braver person.) For this, according to Molpus, he received “a number of death threats and a host of bitter and sick correspondence.” Six years later, in Molpus’ unsuccessful gubernatorial bid, his opponent Kirk Fordice belittled him for having given the speech. Yet those who care about racial reconciliation in Mississippi called his speech a “watershed in Missip…
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…ly imagine the weariness induced by the attempt to constantly acclimate to new hardware as well as new software. What do touchscreens have to do with encyclicals? This would have been an absurd question just ten years ago. But for today’s wired believers, if you don’t have a digital device, you probably won’t even read those encyclicals. Paper is so yesterday. The Pope’s 2011 observations about the dangers of social media are fairly astute, even i…
Read More…efs; and is a non-profit organization as described in the Internal Revenue Code. Religious organizations protested that this four-pronged test would only exempt houses of worship, but not, say, a church that served people of different faiths through a soup kitchen. Under the new proposed rule (which is still subject to a public comment period), an employer seeking an exemption would only have to meet the forth prong of the test, thus widely expand…
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…coming out of the Rutherford Institute (one of the leaders of the right’s new movement to protect ‘religious liberty’), the National Organization for Marriage, Alan Sears, Donald Wildmon, Glenn Beck, or many of the pundits on Fox News. Millennialism, as I’ve written about previously in these pages, is the general term for the belief—religious or secular, but usually religious—that a massive global transformation is imminent, from Christ’s Second…
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…n. They went 78 percent for Romney, up from 74 percent for McCain. The bad news for the Republicans is that, according to Pew, the evangelical share of the population continues to erode—from 21 percent in 2007 to 19 percent in 2012—while the number of the religiously unaffiliated is rising—from 16 percent to 20 percent over the same period. In other words, “nones” and evangelicals are equivalent in numbers. One explanation for this change in Ameri…
Read More…y Sherrod video was. The video is at best innocuous, but Palin, in her Fox News role as mean girl racist cheerleader, is still beating Breitbart’s fake drums of scandal even after his death. Palin’s offensive word salad on Sean Hannity was a Tour de farce in her attempt to turn people away from the HBO movie Game Change which focuses in on the choice of Palin as the vice presidential candidate and the trouble that ensued from bringing her on the R…
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