Religion Dispatches
…6:10 James 2:5 James 5:1-6 1 John 3:17 Now, this is just a quick and dirty list that I stole from what appears to be some hippie site. But that’s just the point: you can’t read the Bible for very long before you stumble into some concern for social or economic justice. The damn thing is riddled with all kinds of socialist or fascist ideas, in Beck’s terms. Not that any of that matters. This hasn’t a thing to do with logic, or faith, or really anyt…
Read More…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
…one has parents worth invoking. And every little step and turn of the talk promotes an etiquette that values open doors and natural achievement. The bride’s genealogy, for example, always precedes the groom’s. The undergraduate degree is one you “graduated from” whereas the graduate degree is one you “received.” Flourishes of detail are unnecessary (the names speak for themselves) unless they don’t. Thus, the employer of one subject is “CytImmune…
Read More
…it won’t happen until there is a massive shift in understanding about what promotes “security.” Israelis have bought into a worldview about security that predominates in much of the world and is the central principle of American foreign policy: “homeland security can only be achieved by domination, either military, economic or diplomatic, of all those who might be potential adversaries.” It was this strategy of domination that led the United State…
Read More
…o sense founded on the Christian religion.” On the back of the pillar is a list of “Punishments for Breaking the Ten Commandments,” such as Deuteronomy 13:10: “Other gods: Thou shalt stone him with stones that he die, because he hath thought to thrust thee away from the Lord thy god.” The intention, obviously, is to demonstrate that atheists, as opposed to Bible-thumpers, are ethical souls, and that America is not a Christian nation. Atheists have…
Read More
…e in the earliest years of his work, in South Africa. To demand a detailed list of specifics from today’s Occupiers would be like making the same demand of Gandhi in the 1890s. Yet Gandhi must have known intuitively, even then, an essential truth he would later articulate clearly: The greatness of any society is not measured by its gross product, nor by the stellar achievements of its privileged few. The measure of greatness is the way a society t…
Read More
…h “raising Godly generations”—was patently not about Covid-19, the speaker list and book offerings were a who’s who of anti-vaccine and anti-mask-mandate evangelicals. All conference registrants received a book defending gender complementarianism by John MacArthur, a pastor who has denied the very existence of the pandemic and whose church has made headlines for defying California’s bans on large gatherings. During his closing remarks, Ken Ham lau…
Read More
…American Judaism. But what does that mean for Jewish law? Here is a brief list of the “changes” that Conservative Judaism has made to halacha: Driving on the sabbath Mixed gender worship Ordaining women Recognition of same sex marriages and ordination of LGBTQ+ clergy These examples display the variance between Conservative Judaism and Orthodox Judaism, but who would really argue that these two movements are not rooted in the same faith tradition…
Read More
…omething about Kubota’s story leaves me unsettled. Call it my inner rationalist or my inner existentialist. Call it what you like, but I’m wary of a scientist who harbors (and who publicly exposes) such passionate feelings about something like immortality. There’s something a little madcap about a science that gets biological with its immortality. I’m a little uncomfortable about what this does to (and with) our actual world. What is biological im…
Read More…will see this accommodation as “something they can mark off their shopping list”— referring to the USCCB’s demands from its Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty. “They will come back to the political establishment, Republican and Democrat, to begin carving out the rest of what they want,” said O’Brien. “They have now an entree into being able to demand further from the political establishment knowing that the political establishment will bend the…
Read More