Search Results for:

VIPREG2024 1xbet free promo code today Singapore

Religion, Morality, and the Death of the American Soap Opera

…undermining the war morale, distracting women with addictive stories that promoted destructive values. To label something a “soap opera” today still implies that what you are describing involves immature behavior, improbable plot twists, and/or unseemly sexual liaisons. Soap opera fans themselves have consistently been characterized as immature, psychologically weak, or missing something crucial in their lives. As a result, those who watch soaps…

Read More

“I ‘Came Out’ For Marriage Equality”: An Anti-Gay Activist Changes His Mind

…ork that I was doing over the course of the past 4 or 5 years or so was to promote the agenda that marriage is the union of a man and a woman only, and that anything contrary to that definition was invalid, basically. And more so over the course of the past year or so, I was working directly with the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) in promoting this agenda, and specifically the way that I opted to do that was by organizing a summer bus to…

Read More

Santorum and the New Catholic-Evangelical Alliance

…s group the Catholic Advocate, and has called for a “Catholic tea party.“) Today, the evangelical-Catholic alliance is hardening around the “religious freedom” issue, and in particular opposition to gay marriage and, most recently, the contraception benefit requirement. Santorum is almost like an accidental beneficiary of this; the GOP base, lacking an evangelical candidate left standing, and dissatisfied with Mitt Romney, has turned to his fideli…

Read More

Kirill’s Sermon May Be Bad Preaching and Even Worse Theology — But it’s a Top-Notch Rejection of Liberal Democracy

…he so-called values that are offered today by those who claim world power. Today there is such a test for the loyalty of this government, a kind of pass to that “happy” world, the world of excess consumption, the world of visible “freedom”. Do you know what this test is? The test is very simple and at the same time terrible – this is a gay parade. The demands on many to hold a gay parade are a test of loyalty to that very powerful world; and we kn…

Read More

Medieval Multitasking: Did We Ever Focus?

…edieval books were very often not the single-author volumes familiar to us today. A binding might include a bit of Chaucer—something from the life of St. Bridget, perhaps—and part of an almanac, or a treatise on herbal remedies. They were mash-ups, that is. Or, to borrow terminology from George P. Landow, they were “dispersed texts,” unburdened by the modern fiction of sequential ordering of thought as “natural” or unitary authorship as normative…

Read More

Oral Roberts, Pioneering Christian Zionist

…rge reproduction of the front page of the Palestine Post (the precursor of today’s Jerusalem Post) of May 14, 1948, which reads: “State of Israel Declared.” When Jerry Falwell died in May of 2007, he was eulogized by leaders of the American Jewish community as “a dear great friend of Israel.” Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson made the case for Israel so consistently and unequivocally that today, among the conservative ev…

Read More

Escalating Afghanistan: What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?

…is the complete insulation from the consequences of bad policy enjoyed by today’s jeunesse doree. Not only do they not have to go to the burning deserts of Iraq or to the chilly forbidding heights of Afghanistan: they don’t even have to know anything about the lives of those who are going. The idea that they might experience any Fallows-like guilt or have any second thoughts about their degree of insulation is simply not an issue today. This extr…

Read More

Keep Jews Interesting: It’s Time to Stop Being Defined by Anti-Semitism

…xceptionalism that we have promoted for millennia from the Hebrew Bible to today? It is, in a way, the dark side of chosenness. If we say, “God, who is the creator of the universe, chooses the Jews above all others,” and promote that view by pointing to holy scripture, is it surprising that some of those others will hold negative opinions of us? This is what Spinoza argued. If you think this sounds provocative, it’s actually sewn into our very tra…

Read More

Yom Kippur Prayers for Corporate Atonement at Occupy Wall St.

…financial doom while their futures were sold from the rich to the richer.  Today, as we think about how commitments must be contemplated in the context of right and wrong, of earth and heaven, we know that those notes have no moral weight, that banks can’t and shouldn’t own the futures of people who work, and that it’s time for the bankers to abandon their claims on everyday people’s futures. I will leave it to another [on this day] to think about…

Read More

Election Day: Hope, Heartbreak, Naiveté, and Studs Terkel

…of the land, even he had to admit something in America was now different. Today, regardless of which side wins, history will be made. Forty-five years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. hoped that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Isn’t that what every religion seeks—a time when the service and character of each individual is recognized…

Read More