Religion Dispatches
…were terrified of him. The brothers never speak anymore; they talk on the phone at least once a day. It’s all there and it’s all unclear. All we know for a fact is that it all came apart very suddenly. On December 9, 2008, Bernie Madoff told his son, Mark, that he intended to pay out $173 million in holiday bonuses two months early. Deeply concerned, Mark revealed this to Andrew, who concluded that Madoff Securities should probably be re-named. T…
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…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…
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…to atheism than its more dismissive predecessors. RD spoke with Maguire by phone about his latest book and the future of belief. What was the impetus for undertaking this after a long career as a priest and theologian who was once a believer? I started out as the absolute true believer. I believed everything the Vatican taught. One of the things that helped me was working in a parish. I started to meet real people and to discover that some of the…
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…held cameras, rough edits that jar the viewers’ visual sensibilities, microphone booms that become visible in shots, and a precedence of minimalist staging, especially in Dogville and Manderlay—though both were striking in their lighting and set design. Antichrist alludes to these anti-beauty sentiments: There are a number of handheld shots, and some curious breaks with the 180-degree rule, but those are early on in the film and it becomes the con…
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…on was transmitted to their insurers by some administrative means, be it a phone call, email or letter. So after years of fighting the mandate, and accusing women’s health advocates and public health official of not understanding why it was a violation of their faith for their insurer to provide birth control that they neither arranged nor paid for, Notre Dame basically turned around and said “never mind.” What happened to cause this astounding tu…
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…coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, here. — eds Amidst a recent layover, my phone pinged to indicate I’d been “mentioned” on Twitter, which is never a good sign. Right-wing provocateur Andy Ngo had tweeted a photo from my 2018 book event suggesting it was an “antifa training” session. He then tagged Haaretz—a left-leaning Israeli newspaper I occasionally write for—asking why they would publish an “antisemitism denier.” Pointing to a recent intervie…
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…n bed on Sunday morning, reading the news about the Orlando shooting on my phone. In the wake of the tragedy, I have found myself mostly at a loss for words, stuttering between anger and sadness. I can not fully describe what I was feeling and thinking that morning as I was getting ready to head over to the LA Pride parade—even as news came in of an arrest in Santa Monica, earlier in the day, of a heavily armed man who was supposedly en route to t…
Read More…Jewish heritage of my wife of 38 years,” he wrote in an email. Later in a phone interview, he said his wife was not a practicing Jew but “ethnically Jewish” because her maternal grandmother was a Jew. Of course, it is possible to express [insert flavor of bigotry here] even if you have friends, relatives, partners, or a spouse who identify as part of [group that is the target of that bigotry]. It’s a close cousin to the “some of my best friends a…
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…regime had threatened his wife. Chen then appealed directly to Congress by phone during a hearing saying that he and his family are not safe in China. On Friday, the Chinese government announced that Chen could apply to study abroad. The Pro-Life Spin Cycle Anti-abortion news and opinion websites have taken to calling Chen a “pro-life dissident,” which is fundamentally misleading. And though he’s been described as an opponent of the One Child poli…
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…ign as head coach after discovering he’d been using his school-issued cell phone to call an escort service. Freeze was hired the following year by Liberty University, where he coached until he left for Auburn, just weeks after the announcement that his contract had been extended through 2030. Just this summer, Freeze contacted a former Liberty student, one of among 20 who’d taken legal action against Liberty for failing to pursue their sexual assa…
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