Religion Dispatches
…that happened over a twelve month period in my family’s life (as well as a number of flashbacks from when I was a young boy). In addition, there were a number of things I didn’t get the chance to explore for a very practical reason: I had a deadline. Working in publishing I’m very conscious about how important deadlines are. Writers need to make those deadlines and because I worked in the industry I wanted to be respectful about that. There were a…
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…the U.S. have reached 205,172 with 4,540 deaths caused by the virus. These numbers change by the hour. (Italy’s death toll is currently over 13,000.) In nearly every way, these statistics subvert the potential for a Good Death as most of us would imagine it. But we’re not the first to experience such disruption. The sudden death of the Good Death Drew Gilpin Faust describes the Good Death in mid-19th century America as a part of respectable middle…
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…lobal conservative movement in response to international conferences in the 1990s, particularly concerning reproductive or women’s rights, which they feared could affect US law back home. At the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development, Pope John Paul II (an early bridge-builder who’d allied himself with Billy Graham and Campus Crusade for Christ in the 1970s) called for interfaith opposition to the conference’s draft program of action…
Read More…with 33% to Romney’s 28%, and Santorum’s 29%. Of all the respondents, only 12% believe President Obama is a Christian, and 52% believe he is a Muslim. These numbers, like in Alabama, are more pronounced among evangelicals: only 9% of evangelicals in Mississippi believe the president is a Christian, and 54% believe he is a Muslim. The real question here is why evangelicals believe this false and debunked conspiracy theory that the Christian presid…
Read More…ing a PR war because they’re perceived by many as espousing virulent, mean-spirited sexism; There is a non-trivial number of men who actually love their daughters and are neither disappointed they exist nor convinced that it means they’re low-status males; There is a non-trivial number of human beings who are unrepentant daughters and/or fallopian tube havers and/or cardigan wearers; There was a Republican president in recent memory who had two da…
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…are winning in state after state. In the past six years, we’ve doubled the number of private school choice programs to 50, the number of private school choice states to 25, plus Washington, D.C., and doubled the number of students currently benefiting from private school choice to 400,000. All told, together, we’ve helped more than a million kids in private school choice programs, and we’re just getting started. “Just getting started”: we should n…
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…s that have led to the current situation that has killed or maimed a small number of Israelis and a huge number of Palestinians? The first step is for the world to demand an immediate cease-fire. That cease-fire should be imposed by the United Nations and backed unequivocally by the United States. Its terms must include the following: A. Hamas stops all firing of missiles, bombs, or any other violent action originating from the West Bank or Gaza,…
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…criticism can easily devolve into unthinking prejudice. I can think of any number of examples from atheist conferences I’ve attended, such as the time I watched with dismay as attendees shouted “show us some ankle” at women wearing burkas for a satirical musical performance, or when a group of fundamentalist Muslim protesters was encircled by a crowd of hundreds of atheist conference attendees shouting things like “go back to the Middle East, you…
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…htenment Types On the surface, Buddhism can look pretty messy. There are a number of conflicting stories about the founder of the tradition. Many Buddhists consider Gautama Buddha to be divine, a savior of humanity, but some don’t. Some Buddhists barely think of him at all. And, despite scientific cosmology, there are a large number of mortal creatures—most of them non-human—inhabiting a spectacular 31-tiered cosmos, from the hell beings and hungr…
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…illingness to slow down the pace of development in the face of ever-rising numbers of visitors to the region. Ravi Chopra has noted that for the careful observer of Indian weather patterns of the last two decades the intensity of the flooding should not have come as the utter surprise that it did. These broader trajectories underlie what is happening now. From the safety of my office, as I read the news and engage with observers online, I am ob…
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