Religion Dispatches
…m the Lincoln museum that the public wants both of these figures—and not just as a study in contrasts to set side-by-side. Instead, we must learn to grapple with the fact that the national savior and the ruthless pol could be joined in a single man. Given the recurring violence of our contemporary political discourse, it is hard to avoid making yet another link between Lincoln’s time and our own. Whether or not Obama will prove to be Lincolnesque…
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…lways means an uncertain future. They try their hardest to cling to the existing structures, especially hierarchical structures where some people can be rated as “better” and others as “worse.” If those studies are accurate, it makes perfect sense that conservatives would insist on, and even enjoy, narratives that turn political life into a struggle of good guys against bad guys. By believing in those stories as the God’s honest truth, by telling…
Read More…when universities continue to weigh First Amendment issues against the inclusive learning environments they purport to uphold, maybe they should just start with a simple Google search before inviting campus speakers….
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…have knives—safety hazard. So I had a wooden athame that I bought from the St. Louis Hari-Krishna temple that I used instead. My roommates found no end of amusement in this; they kept stealing it to use as a letter opener. (They also didn’t seem to realize that the athame was a tool, not a god.) I don’t hold that against them, though; they were jackasses, but I knew that when I moved in with them. He continued: I had a boss once who, although he w…
Read More…n mind after the conquests in Greece: the symbol of a nostalgized, purer past, one lost in the fluidity of time and the frenetic repetition of conquest. It’s a hell of a poetic message for the newly emerging empire of Augustus that was already bragging about its “eternity” (and so it’s small wonder that the emperor eventually exiled Ovid from Rome to the Black Sea, though there are debates still today about what actually prompted this). According…
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…oppose her in the runup to 2020. And while the senator from Massachusetts still insists she does not have her sights on the presidency, she is on the interview circuit talking about the subject of newest book, This Fight is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class, with what we might well call “evangelical” zeal. Hence this reflection, from Peter Laarman, on the many uses of the term. –The Eds. In our ongoing conversations these days…
Read More…and increasingly anti-American zone that now runs from the mountains in western Pakistan all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza is simply the last in a long line of Islamic states and territories that identify the US as the major source of their current troubles. That is a devastating source of global insecurity, and not only for the United States of America. It has also stained our national honor. In that regard, the most important lines of…
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…not for religious reasons, since there are so very many of them. The cash-strapped State of North Carolina spent a lot more than one cent to get that penny back. As they should have done, though this citizen’s symbolic point had been made quite eloquently by then. No Picking and Choosing I have returned many times to that story as I have listened to Catholic churches, Catholic institutions from hospitals to universities, and two Catholic presiden…
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…ish” (from his 1953 collection, Nine Stories). Yet what is assuredly the most disturbing story in the collection is the ninth one, “Teddy.” This one tells the tale of yet one more “wise child,” a spiritual adept who is far enough evolved as to recall his prior incarnations. He also knows that the karmic wheel has dictated that this time around he is destined to be killed by his younger sister, who will push him into an empty pool on a cruise ship….
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…ce in Wales. But even more tellingly, we learn that the Office of National Statistics there does not recognize the religion separately, so followers were bunched under the “atheist” category (which is, after all, fitting since there is no deity in the Star Wars cosmology). Moral community and religious formation do not emanate only from our celebrity leaders, they are also shaped by another so-called secular cultural phenomenon: the Hollywood drea…
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