Search Results for:

cheap airline tickets san diego to san francisco phone number 1-800-299-7264

Tea Party 2.0, Ready For Post-Election Launch

…hey distributed “6 million voter guides, 8 million mail pieces, 15 million phone calls, 500,000 doors knocked on by volunteers, and radio advertising covering 56 congressional districts and 22 U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races,” they are now (apparently as I write this) surveying voters to learn “who went to the polls and why.” Instructive for those of us who follow the influence of the religious right on the tea party movement (arguing that it’…

Read More

War on Christmas Affirmed by Southern Baptist Convention

…offensive resolutions. I’ve done this since 1997 when I was awakened by a phone call from a Lutheran friend that began, “What’s with you Southern Baptists and Mickey Mouse?” I was unaware that the messengers voted on a resolution to boycott Disney because of its policies toward homosexuals. One resolution approved by the messengers this year that may not be so widely publicized is a resolution “On Affirming the Use of the Term ‘Christmas’ in Publ…

Read More

The Abandoned Orphanage: Hillary Clinton’s Mother Teresa Moment

…ving into Clinton’s religious history, we studied her relationships with a number of spiritual mentors, including Tikkun’s Michael Lerner, who was soon replaced by “sacred psychologist” Jean Houston, who famously helped the First Lady get in touch with the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt. Later, after Mother Teresa died, Clinton invoked the spirit of the nun as her guiding light so religiously that one might be excused for wondering whether she meant i…

Read More

A Religious History of American Neuroscience

…me in the SPR threw themselves behind a new contraption called the “psycho-phone” through which the inventors claimed to be hearing the voices of angels. The psychophone no doubt sounds absurd, but I can’t say that it sounds much more far-fetched than a transcranial magnetic stimulator. Both demonstrate the enduring cultural impulse toward techno-theologizing. However much neuroscientists might want to forswear an interest in the metaphysics of th…

Read More

Aliens To Arrive in Alabama Today!

…bsite from which he claimed to get his information. He pulled out his cell phone: “Freddie!” he said to an unseen interlocutor. “Will you find me what that website for the saucer, the prophecy, for tomorrow night – the 14th?” He paused, then yelled: “THE SAUCER! All I want is access to the information so I can give it to someone else.” He then recited the web address of a YouTube video. It was my own searches, however, that turned up Goodchild’s w…

Read More

Friending Pope Benedict on Facebook?

…n Paul II, Pope Benedict sent the following text message to Italian mobile phone users: “Let us go forth in the joy of the risen Lord and trusting in his permanent help.” JPII had been texting Italians with a “thought of the day” while he was still alive, so Benedict was simply carrying on this tradition. Pope Benedict has more recently used text messaging to communicate with attendees throughout this year’s World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia. H…

Read More

A Color-Blind America? Don’t Fall For The Okey-Doke

…n there was the energy, the unmistakable nervous energy of hundreds of thousands of people gathering for one common purpose. We all knew that we were on the brink of something, but we did not know exactly what. Win or lose, there was so much love, peace, and general enthusiasm—like what I’d heard about Woodstock (less the partial nudity and drugs). This was by all accounts—both classic and contemporary—a religious experience. As an ethnographer, h…

Read More

Battling for the Soul of the Democratic Party

…ca are (and, moreover, in the wake of Obama’s election, who will get their phone calls returned from the White House) certain names keep cropping up. Pastor Rick Warren, who sees no daylight between his views and James Dobson’s, but who, according to Sullivan’s book, former-DNC-chair Terry McAuliffe blasphemously didn’t know; Jim Wallis, best-selling author and activist who lambasts the religious right for its petty intolerance and the left for “n…

Read More

An Immigrant’s Tale: The Pull of the Homeland

…not-religion so very clearly and abruptly. We didn’t have to change in the phone booth, as it were, into the non-religious as we transitioned abruptly from ritual to rat race. It was not so very problematic for one to bleed over into the other. And during Ramadan, we grew up to expect lighter workloads. Migrant workers in certain Gulf countries learned to expect total lack of productivity and sometimes a complete absence of office workers during R…

Read More

Religion at Decade’s End

…ces like Tehran, or Athens, or Beijing, that are armed and enabled by cell phone technology and the almost instantaneous circulation of striking images of authoritarian crackdown, impossible to contain or control.   There is an old philosophical quandary posed as follows: can a fish imagine water? Similarly, Religion Dispatches exists within the very medium that it is simultaneously attempting to theorize. It is as global as the instruments it use…

Read More