Religion Dispatches
…ferson felt free to edit and rewrite the Bible to serve their own rationalist tastes, or Thomas Paine who insisted that the “rights of man” did not have and did not need to have any supernatural foundation. There were many tradition-minded Protestants in the mix as well, but given the fact of the religious diversity within the original thirteen or fourteen colonies (Nova Scotia was a puzzler, but eventually sided with the royalists and thus stayed…
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…sexual licentiousness on the part of Hawaiians. (He was defended by Robert Louis Stevenson from claims of his unworthiness in 1890.) We have, of course, come to understand Hansen’s disease, and colonial attitudes towards indigenous peoples such as Hawaiians, (we hope) in new ways. So, too, have we many moved beyond the Protestant anti-Catholicism, to which some of the contemporary criticism of Father Damien has been attributed. Pope Paul VI recogn…
Read More…nt municipal bonds for communities ranging from the impoverished city of East St. Louis to Chester, Pennsylvania, to the West Pacific U.S. territory of Guam.” Goldberg was sentenced to 18 months in prison, five year’s probation and fined $100,000. U.S. Attorney O’Connor, who prosecuted Goldberg, spoke harshly of his crimes: K. William O’Connor described Goldberg as having engineered “a conspiratorial fraud of spectacular scope,” which purposefully…
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…a group of black millennials, assisted by clergy of various faiths in the St. Louis area, supported by national faith-based organizing groups, something new is happening in Ferguson. This is an anti-racist movement that is diverse, diffuse, and democratic. It is also deeply religious. It is religious because people of faith are key to its operation and sustenance. It is religious because the protesters are participating in prayer and liturgy toge…
Read More…ewed several of the main arguments marshaled from philosophical ethics and statistics in support of the death penalty. At far greater length, I reviewed US constitutional law concerning the death penalty, primarily by summarizing the most important Supreme Court cases since 1968. My initial comments about Jesus and Socrates were intended merely to highlight one of the fascinating features of the so-called “western tradition”—namely, its deeply amb…
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…hich, as he wryly noted, “has become a sort of religion among us.” He suggested still more coyly, in a famous essay composed in 1929 (and entitled simply “Olympia”), that there was a kind of paganism at the heart of his revival: shake off, and from which—I will risk this seeming blasphemy—it would not be well for it to free itself completely: and that is the cult of the human being, of the human body, mind and flesh, feeling and will, instinct and…
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…ear pretty much whatever they want within the boundaries of simple modesty. Summary: The producers of “The Sisterhood” know what to do to create good reality television, but the first episode distinctly lacks much of the true reality of the discernment process to become a sister. Let’s see what happens next week. …
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…et he has seen men walk on the moon and spacecraft sent beyond our solar system. The first short two-minute film sequences were screened in Paris in the year of his birth; he could now call up YouTube sequences many times that length on a laptop computer or iTouch. It is a different world. One Hundred and Twelve Years Mr. Breuning was interviewed by PBS reporters on Monday, and his remarkably engaging and self-effacing personality reminded me of a…
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…sador is, whether he or she is married, and how many children they have. Just last week, for instance, we learned that Fernando Felipe Sánchez Campos of Costa Rica is 36, married, with two children. And we learn that Gábor Győriványi of Hungary is 51, married, with four children. Yet there may be a more subtle rationale to this standard formula of diplomatic description than the simple recitation of facts. The arrival of new diplomats in Vatican C…
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…otive, since this will surely make the Frombork Cathedral a prominent tourist destination. The story also seems like it’s been taken from one of the more surreal moments in Hamlet: “Alas poor Yorick, I knew him well, Horatio.” Of course, what we in the audience know is that this half-mad Prince who’s just leapt into an open grave doesn’t know anything; he’s making the skull’s story up as he goes. As Sartre knew all too well, “the dead are prey to…
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