Religion Dispatches
…tters very little to me (as a voter, as a thinker, and as a believer) that John McCain doesn’t articulate a deity familiar to any available denomination of Christianity (or Judaism or Hinduism or Islam). John McCain is, indisputably, a man of courage and intelligence. To suggest that he is not recognizably Baptist (nor ostensibly Episcopalian) is merely to demonstrate that our enterprise of discerning religion from political candidates misses, pre…
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…anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more famil…
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…Generals Patton and MacArthur, Mel Gibson’s William Wallace, and the actor John Wayne, men who meted out justice and pursued righteousness, confident that the ends would justify the means. Evangelicals embraced secular heroes because men unencumbered by traditional Christian virtue were those best suited to the militancy required by this rugged “Christian manhood.” When Donald Trump appeared on the political stage, he stood firmly in this traditio…
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…as killed in Afghanistan on June 4, 2011. Her body arrived at Rochester NY Airport on June 13, and her funeral is coming up on Saturday morning, June 18. Cohocton is not alone in this, as it joins the many other small towns and cities in the United States and beyond that mourn the consequences of militarism and war. Nor is the town alone as it is forced to join other places where sexuality is contested in contemporary American culture in overt way…
Read More…ing, the status of Obama’s Catholic National Advisory Council is unclear. (Phone calls to Obama headquarters were not returned.) However, the dust-up between the always vociferous Donohue and the Obama campaign was reminiscent of the battles that took place during the 2004 presidential campaign when a group of conservative Catholics and neoconservatives were joined by conservative Christian evangelicals in attacking the Catholic authenticity of th…
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…rsuit of drumming to be indistinguishable from spiritual pursuits. So with John Coltrane. When he is pouring his breath into the saxophone in the midst of “Pursuance,” part III of A Love Supreme, distinctions between music and musician, instrument and player, and music and listener, break down. Maybe it’s a mystical experience, God reaching to us through the music. Or maybe it’s just the musical arrangement itself, some deliciously delicate balanc…
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…ciety,” he said. CNN traces the start of the backlash to early 2016 when a number of political leaders began making “unprompted attacks on Indonesia’s LGBT community.” It notes that conservative Islam is a growing political force, evident in the arrest and conviction of Jakarta’s Christian governor on blasphemy charges. The report says human rights activists have been disappointed by President Joko Widodo’s “lackluster” defense of LGBT people. Sal…
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…waste American money to buy their expensive oil when we could have our own cheap oil?” “Why is he trying to make rich people poor?” “How is it right to punish rich people for working hard and realizing the American Dream?” It was late on a Friday night and I was tired, so I half-heartedly responded by explaining that there are other factors to consider in every charged question she’d been armed with. But I wondered, “Why the hell was the Salvation…
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…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…
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…er it’ll remain that way. In the end, the relative media blitz that forced John McCain to renounce the endorsement of John Hagee might never have happened; progressive bloggers and a host of new progressive political messaging organizations had in fact been pounding at the McCain-Hagee association for weeks before the late-May media breakout, and the effort quite clearly paved the way for the May 22 straw that broke the valuable alliance between a…
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