Religion Dispatches
…of the collider lit up with a spirograph of pastel whenever particles made contact. The result resembled a flower; perhaps the dieffenbachia watching plant porn on the other side of the room might have liked this, had they been able to choose. Keats’ hope is that by bringing together the most traditional of prayer spaces—the altar—with the most modern of experimental physics—the LHC—God will take notice. There was at least some response from the f…
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…e poking fun at conspiracy theories regarding government coverups of alien contact, this month’s parade featured: A blow-up Uncle Sam, six stories high… followed after a while by a four-story American eagle, and a six-story firefighter. A real bald eagle rode a keeper’s arm on the World Bird Sanctuary’s float, along with an owl and a big green snake. Mythic narratives and cultural heroes mixed with symbols of identity and values, all in a mass rit…
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…ionships between individuals, but is more easily disseminated to a greater number of people. We experience AI as a crisis because, like the rabbis of the Talmud, we actually have conflicting needs and desires. We crave the efficiency of AI because it can save time and effort, helping us write emails, make phone calls, and recall and summarize information. At the same time, we’re seeking human connection when we do reach out, and AI fails to provid…
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…no signal, which means no AP alerts, no Facebook, no Twitter—and no way to contact friends and family. Except for the radio, we’re cut off. And so is everyone else in the mass of humanity that lives and works below 39th Street. In the afternoon, after the worst of Sandy has departed for the north, I walk across Avenue B again into the Red zone. Some time during the night the East River, which is really part of the ocean, flooded over the boardwalk…
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…e, Focus on the Family began mobilizing its supporters, calling on them to contact their senators and urge them to vote “no” on Daschle’s nomination. Ashley Horne, federal policy analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said that “Citizens who care about family values should be concerned about Daschle’s nomination. Constituents should make their opposition heard on this nominee.” “Tom Daschle is a disaster appointment, the opposite of a national pr…
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…nsidious thing about words is that the act of decrying them promotes their usage.” Being that the term is now ubiquitous, perhaps a look back at the history of “Judeo-Christian” is in order. Popularized by Liberals The first recorded uses of the term “Judeo-Christian” were in England in the 1820s, though it was used quite differently than it is in today’s political rhetoric. The term was first coined by protestant missionaries who used it to refer…
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…their families to join Protzman in Dallas in November is STILL THERE. The number is certainly down from its height as many have stayed and cut off contact with their families. They recently took a road trip to Arizona to attend Trump’s rally, which garnered national attention with Protzman’s claim that Trump was really JFK Jr. in disguise. Protzman’s followers claimed that their seats meant Protzman had contacts with Trump, which renewed interest…
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…lity in places where they are numerous enough to be able to leverage their numbers effectively and to experience themselves as total social community. Where they are so few as to make political mobilization ineffective or even costly to their relationship with their host community, they have not. Mother Jones’s Stephanie Mencimer suggested that fear of harming Mitt Romney’s run for the presidency kept the Church on the sidelines in 2012 marriage…
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…u? Do you? We do. We need to see it, to watch the bowling pin make cranial contact, to see the rape, dimly, to track the seepage of another’s blood. We need it, too, as we sit in our swivel chairs, shuttling our computer mouse over the Web site crawl, onto our next tale of true crime dullness. We must want to imagine Nixzmary as she died, or to picture a face marred by a brother’s bullet. All of this is our striving effort to do anything, anything…
Read More…was allowed to continue priestly duties throughout the diocese, including contact with children, even though hundreds of photographs of children were discovered by the Bishop on Ratigan’s laptop. The pictures including upskirt pictures of girls and pictures of a young girl naked from the waist down. While Kansas City priests tiptoed around the news in masses on Sunday, there is no doubt that the indictment is another warning shot aimed at the enc…
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