Religion Dispatches
…ot. After that, he stayed more often after class, one day whipping out his phone to show me a photo of a white supremacist leader standing up in a convertible during what was obviously a white pride parade. The red-faced, fist waving man in the picture was flanked by two little girls sitting in the back seat, arms crossed with very pronounced frowns on their faces. “They don’t look all that happy,” I remarked to my student. “Those are my daughters…
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…st never true. If you simply open Veronica Lueken’s prophecies to a random page and read about Freemasons and UFOs, it’s easy to assume that all Baysiders are paranoid and hysterical. But when I did my ethnography I found that most Baysiders were pleasant, reasonable people. I also found that Baysiders exerted a lot of agency in terms of what they believed and how they practiced. Some seemed more interested in conspiracy theories about the Vatican…
Read More…st in today’s spiritual marketplace? Linn Marie Tonstad suggests that I am participating in a postmodern marketplace of religious ideas, choosing my “beliefs” from a smorgasbord of options. But then in the last sentence she seems to suggest that there might be a “marketplace” motive to my actions—that I might stand to benefit in the marketplace from my yearlong experience of atheism. First of all, I’m not sure what the marketplace of religious bel…
Read More…t on record in support of compassionate immigration reform. How has that impacted your work? I get phone calls from LDS people who would identify themselves as politically conservative, but they say, “There’s this guy I know . . . Can you help him? He’s a really good guy.” People need to remember that there are many “really good guys” out there waiting for immigration reform. People coming to the US for work get villainized. “Illegal alien” is o…
Read More…(in possible violation of military code) at the Values Voters Summit for a panel. The Liberty Institute’s Jeff Mateer put his hand on Monk’s shoulder and praised him, saying, “We’ve gotten phone calls from military members who are undergoing discrimination…and with the exception of him, those folks that have called us have all wanted to remain anonymous. Sergeant Monk, to his credit, is willing to stand up.” Let’s read between the lines here: Mon…
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…front door again and again. The doorknob rattles, and the family’s pain is palpable—it is almost as if she remembers that this house was once her home. In a pivotal scene, Morgan decides to shoot this zombie who was once his wife, an agonizing decision. He tells his son to cover his ears. From a second story window, he takes aim at his wife as she shambles near the house, but he breaks down and sobs, unable to pull the trigger. What if part of the…
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…p the ante. If Dr. Butler is right that the Zimmerman acquittal displays a particular kind of god, the “American god,” then the only response to the problem of (this) god is atheism. I’m not talking about the atheism of the likes of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, or the late Christopher Hitchens. The atheism I’m talking about entails social, political, and intellectual struggle, not against some god-in-the-abstract, but rather against a specific…
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…at from 1880 to 1940, the stretch of the Lower West Side of Manhattan from Park Street down to Battery Park, along Greenwich and Washington Streets, was known as “Little Syria.” An exhibit of the same name has been running this month, created by the Arab American National Museum of Dearborn, Michigan, in a space rented from Three Legged Dog, a multi-arts space carved out of the ground floor of the Brooklyn Battery Parking Garage. This very block w…
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…ew up in a household with four sons and three of us became priests. That’s part of my story and its still part of my thinking. My moral creed for all Christians does not require belief in a god; there’s a whole cultural development that’s very dependent on Judaism and it’s something that I treasure. Many of my sensitivities are still rooted in that tradition. This is a book called “Christianity Without God” but instead of the Gospels, you use the…
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…s a surprise to the pair, who had come to City Hall on Saturday morning to participate in a gay rights demonstration, said their attorney, Jose Luis Marquez. They had received hints that a wedding might take place, but were doubtful. They had already been rejected three times, despite an order from Mexico’s Supreme Court last June. More from the Washington Blade: A local judge officiated what the San Diego Union-Tribune described as the “impromptu…
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