Religion Dispatches
…ct the hundreds of thousands of gay and lesbian people who are doing their best to raise the children they have adopted. As someone who adopted a child, Cindy and I know better than most couples the amazing satisfaction that comes from providing love to an unwanted child. I believe a child is best raised by a mother and father because of the unique contributions that they make together to the development of a child.” McCain refused to rule out nom…
Read More…iscourse” by the public. “Finding a successful resolution will require the best thinking and goodwill of all across the political spectrum, the highest levels of statesmanship, and the strongest desire to do what is best for all of God’s children,” Church leaders said. Elected officials and Latino activists have asked the Church to take a more public stance on immigration in part because the immigration debate has been most heated in western state…
Read More
…ean here the unreconstructed monotheistic God) has no role whatsoever. The best man wins the duel—or rather, the man with the best wand. Now, one could, of course, make the same claims about comic-book sagas like Superman or Batman. Why should Harry Potter have to take any more refuge in the numinous than Kal-El or Bruce Wayne? Well, because there is something intrinsically religious about the Potter series; and I don’t just mean the rab…
Read More
…triotic sensibilities. Underscoring her own patriotism, when accepting the best picture and best director awards, Bigelow dedicated them to the “women and men in the military who risk their lives daily to keep us safe.” With these words and in the film, Bigelow reminds us that war is hell, while reassuring us of our good intentions. For all the terror it depicted, the message was predictable and safe. A Modern Form of Nature Religion In Avatar, di…
Read More
…r Christian apologist and avid blogger, who noted that Dr. Robin DiAngelo, best known for her book White Fragility, had partnered with the United Methodist Church to explore the topic of white privilege in a video lecture. Metaxas took this announcement as an opportunity to mock and critique the notion of white privilege: “Did [Jesus] have ‘white privilege’ even though he was entirely without sin? Is the United Methodist Church covering that? I th…
Read More
…ement, particularly the ‘Joel’s Army’ teaching of the 80s and 90s that was promoted by the Kansas City Fellowship [later known as the Kansas City Prophets, the forerunner of today’s International House of Prayer.] and even for a time, the Vineyard movement.” Hamon and other Latter Rain-influenced apostles and prophets believe that the time is nigh for this “extreme form of apocalypticism”—what used to be called the emergence of the Manifest Sons o…
Read More
…ographs taken at Abu Graib… In short, the camera is not best suited to the presentation of Hamlet’s great soliloquies. “Such stuff as dreams are made of” do not have exhibition value, and neither do ghosts. But corpses do. So the images that stick best to the celluloid are Ophelia’s corpse floating on water, or Hamlet’s corpse, dominating the stage in death. And that is why they stick best to the Modern memory as well. Ironically, what is missing…
Read More
…g; even if it may not serve our interests in the short run, it’s still the best alternative human beings have come up with. In this case, one can certainly understand Netanyahu’s concern; Mubarak is “the devil he knows.” But it’s often the case that autocratic rulers are easier to deal with since they typically answer to no one. Yet, while they appear more stable in the short run, more dictatorships have been overthrown by democratic movements tha…
Read More…thingy … totally disgusted me. (That purity vow was a godsend!) I tried my best to be straight. I had the best of training. My parents were both straight. My brothers and sisters were all straight. It wasn’t until adulthood that I found out I had a lesbian cousin. As far as I knew, I came completely from straight stock. I simply had to be straight, right? Well, not so much. At the age of 16, I uttered those dreaded words, “I am a lesbian.” The fac…
Read More
…eternal destiny.” Banana, Proof of God’s Existence Comfort is a man whose best-known evolutionary criticism is the banana (or “the atheist’s nightmare,” as he calls it), which he says proves God’s existence because of its intelligently-designed appearance. In an unintentionally funny video from 2006, he expounds on the brilliant design of the banana, as a most impressed Kirk Cameron looks on. That Comfort is so lacking in imagination that he can’…
Read More