Religion Dispatches
…e bit of prayerful business out of the way, I turned from the ecstatic mob of Santiago-rushing crentes and walked down the darkened block, gripping my scuffed iPhone and returning to my real life, a reality somehow made newer….
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…iological reductionism or determinism. That’s just wrong. Narrow-minded, misconceived. Evolutionary social science has advanced tremendously over the last couple of decades, and humanists ought to pay attention. We now know a lot about human nature and about the complex interplay between biology and culture, and these findings have major consequences for the study of imaginative culture such as literature and film. Did you have a specific audience…
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…gence apps” including As One America, which contains the name, address and phone number of Christian neighbors “who are not showing up to vote or who are not registered.” He then showed a map with big red arrows pointing to precincts “within striking distance” from Vida Church to the precincts that are “where the devil’s got a stronghold that God wants to break up.” The app was developed by Superfeed Technologies, which has also designed apps for…
Read More…nightly MSNBC show late last month, Lisa Darden knew she needed to make a phone call. Darden, a filmmaker and talent agent, had been interviewing conservative evangelical Christian leaders and getting a behind-the-scenes look at the religious right for the past several years for her soon to be released movie, For Such a Time as This. The documentary seeks to bridge the gap between anti-gay Christians and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgende…
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….” But I am also trying to be fair in how I tell the story. In his work on Scientology, Hugh Urban describes trying to balance a “hermeneutics of suspicion” with a “hermeneutics of respect.” I faced a similar dilemma. Much of what has been written about the Baysiders has been either from the perspective of theologians representing the Catholic hierarchy or the anti-cult movement. No one has really tried to put a human face on this group. At the sa…
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…image of their beloved leader. “I know that some [gays and lesbians] are discouraged and even not going to church because they are being abused. Even today they are being abused. But please don’t be discouraged. God created you and God is on your side,” said perhaps the only member of Uganda’s clergy ministering to the LGBT community. “I had hardly slept” For Senyonjo himself, it had taken an act of great personal courage to be at the January 28 f…
Read More…iend from Olivia’s party days. (I confess I tensed my jaw a bit during the scene when Frankie and Mark discuss their concern for Olivia’s welfare, referring to her in the third person when she’s sitting right there.) After the dinner, Frankie leaves Olivia a sweet voicemail, leading her to wonder whether maybe she’s ready to date again. But then she discovers that he actually has a girlfriend, and, bizarrely, had tried to hide this fact from her….
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…ministry 1-888-RAPTURE. Apparently the UFO issue got onto Lindsey’s radar screen because of reports that United Nations is paying attention to it, as discussed here. Lindsey offers a mass of evidence (quite disturbing if true) claiming sightings by military personnel who witnessed UFOs disarming nuclear weapons. In Lindsey’s interpretation, such disarmament fits a similar script as dystopian movies in which aliens “are fattening us up for lunch.”…
Read More…were not among the included files, nor were any meeting notes or minutes discussing the Temple. The only data concerning what the monument committee thought about the Satanic monument are hinted at in e-mails to and from an executive assistant. In fact, reading through the files, I felt sympathy for this assistant, who dutifully relayed all phone messages from constituents to the legislature. This resulted in e-mails like: [John Doe] at [555-555-5…
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…ing the Qur’an. The Christian mumbled some verses from the Bible, the only scripture he knew. “Good enough,” said the ISIS militant, unaware that the verses were not Qur’anic, and let him through unharmed. When I asked the Kurd what kind of people supported ISIS in his home town of Dierzor, he said only a few did; they were mostly poor people who received money if they joined the movement as fighters. ISIS, he said, pays their soldiers 1000 dollar…
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