Religion Dispatches
…lling one person. The monthly average for June is half that. It’s only the latest in a series of flash floods. In Tennessee, 18 people died. In Arkansas, 20 were killed. The waitresses looked teary-eyed at the customers, as if they were simply unable to bear any more bad news. We stared back at the women with the same expression. What the hell has been unleashed? Of course, you don’t have to be washed in the blood of salvation to know that somethi…
Read More…bama’s vaunted Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships? In the latest installment of RD’s collaboration with bloggingheads.tv, associate editor Sarah Posner talks religion and politics with Get Religion’s Mollie Ziegler Hemingway. They don’t exactly agree on the politics of the Democrats’ efforts to reach “people of faith,” and they definitely don’t agree on the question of whether LGBT rights should yield to religious conscience right…
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…m our historical experience, and from the ‘ethos’ of self-righteousness as promoted by Prime Minister Begin. In my opinion, there is no greater threat to our survival than this ethos of self-righteousness. It renders us blind and unable to understand our situation—and it gives legitimacy to bad national leadership. Both Harkabi and Leibowitz died in 1994. Toward the ends of their lives, each spoke in prophetic terms about Israel’s political-milita…
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…hurch, which eventually built cathedrals for just such periodic gatherings of the local groups that otherwise worshipped and carried out their justice work in their own homes and centers. So while the Vatican staff is busy translating its latest dictum into various languages, Catholic people, with the help of our friends, are living new models of Church. We do so in the hope that we might salvage the heart of the tradition we value, even while the…
Read More…ppropriate—whether directed toward ourselves or towards others. And so the latest episode of Doctor Who challenges us to reflect not only on the nature of reality and how to identify it, but on the question of what images we make of God (mentally more often than physically), and to recognize that the mask that constitutes our image of God usually bears a striking resemblance to ourselves. Henry Jenkins__________ When The Doctor ‘wakes up’ in the…
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…n find them streaming on Netflix) — ed. Joseph Laycock_______________ This latest Doctor Who episode contains several elements for vampire aficionados. The vampire aristocrat Rosana Calvierri is apparently based on Elizabeth Bathory, the historical “blood countess” of Hungary, who would have been twenty years old in 1580 when the episode is set. Bathory was accused of murdering young women and bathing in their blood, just as Calvierri preyed on th…
Read More…_ At the beginning of “The Time of Angels,” the first half of Doctor Who’s latest two-parter, the Doctor and Amy have found themselves in the 51st century, assisting a military mission to recover a crashed ship’s cargo. We meet a military commander who identifies himself as “Father Octavian—Bishop Second Class, 20 clerics at my command.” Clearly there is some interesting church history in the thirty centuries between that future and our present, b…
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…beral go together in that sense… Yes, in the sense that a liberal does not promote any particular belief. Which is not to say that a liberal doesn’t believe in anything. Liberals do believe in something, whether it’s the 19th century variety or the American left-of-center variety. But it doesn’t seek to impose a particular belief on society at large. And that’s in some ways held against it by those who want society to be overtly Christian, or kick…
Read More…ceedingly difficult to say anything but ‘amen’ to the new atheists in this latest quest. On the other hand this move could backfire and spark ire among Catholics causing them to circle the wagons and dull their own criticism. It’s a fine line. The problem was caused by the inability for the Church to police itself adequately. While it’s preposterous to believe that any institution—whether it be the US financial services industry or the Catholic Ch…
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…e bones of Jews cavalierly are our enemies.” The bones that generated the latest controversy were found during construction of a hospital wing in the city of Ashkelon, on the Mediterranean. Barzilai Hospital, the city’s major medial center, which serves hundreds of thousands of people, is in dire need of a new emergency room. The plan was to build an ER that is bombproof, as Ashkelon lies within the trajectory of Qassam rockets fired from Gaza. T…
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