Religion Dispatches
…means that truth, insofar as any human can grasp it, is inherently fluid. Today’s fixed set of demands may easily seem like tomorrow’s folly. Gandhi’s program was especially vague 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…
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…He devised an abacus, or counting board, that mimics the algorithms we use today for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. It has been called the first counting device in Europe to function digitally—even the first computer. In a chronology of computer history, Gerbert’s abacus is one of only four innovations mentioned between 3000 BC and the invention of the slide rule in 1622. Like a modern scientist, Gerbert questioned authority. He…
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…that, while the book was originally published in 2003, it continues to be promoted as “an essential resource” as its publisher, Ascension Press, noted in an email today. As documented in the Bridge Initiative report, Spencer has written for numerous Catholic news outlets, and he has been cited as an expert in others. While some of these are fringe websites, like Church Militant, others are more mainstream, like Our Sunday Visitor, one of the most…
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…rly corrupted and colonized Christianity—play a crucial role in validating today’s white power machinations. This form of Christianity becomes especially and conveniently valuable in a culture that has always depended on violent domination when other means of domination fail. Its theology, such as it is, centers on violence and suffering as redemptive. The keynote here is regeneration through blood, or Jesus and John Wayne, as Kristin Kobes Du Mez…
Read More…a lot of people about the significance of evolution and how it got us here today. More importantly, it seems to have engaged the science education community to develop ways to address the teaching of evolution more directly. Today, evolution education has gained prominence with a host of new teaching programs. Certainly in the case of Dover, teachers in the school district there were timid about teaching the subject, fearing it would offend the Ch…
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…broad concepts—such as “tradition,” “Russian,” and “the West”—can grant in today’s political context, 30 years after the end of Soviet Communism and amid growing authoritarianism worldwide. References to the West are kept purposefully vague so that the Kremlin’s “pro-family” battle aligns with U.S. conservatives and White nationalists’ own culture war against “woke elites,”[22] rather than treating them as anti-Russian threats to be countered. For…
Read More…han same-sex marriage will ever do.” (UPDATE: Mohler addresses the article today in his daily podcast, The Briefing.) But what if marriage, overall, isn’t on the rocks because of the so-called “divorce culture,” but is actually more stable precisely because of the very factors the Christian right frequently points to as causes of the “decline” of marriage: feminism, the broadening of reproductive rights and options, and cohabitation? Miller explai…
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…similation is never complete with any group, it certainly will not be with today’s immigrants either. They will change the culture, for better or for worse, just as their predecessors have—but I would say, they will change it likely to a greater degree because the initial gap is wider.” If people from different parts of the European continent “remain different all the way up until today,” he reasons, “what about people from different continents?”…
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…the forces of light must now preserve civilization itself. In the face of today’s problems—“financial crisis, decline of our values, the deterioration of the family, rampant greed and materialism… terror and war”—the only way to overcome our “hopelessness” and “fear” is to “return to the values and principles that define us. The Jewish Jesus I have laid out before you embodies these Judeo-Christian values.” In Boteach’s Rohrschach test, the Jews,…
Read More…to a veritable boom in the quarrying industry were that still the practice today). The same for homosexuals. And the biblical conditions for divorce are so strict that a woman could be beaten within an inch of her life and still not be allowed to legally separate. The point is that nobody in the mainstream Christian church today would argue any of these propositions. A hundred years ago, that was not necessarily the case. In other words, the defin…
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