Religion Dispatches
…Stone cover remains unlikely, Pastor Rick Warren, author of the worldwide best seller, The Purpose Driven Life, and the Reader’s Digest Association have entered into a partnership that is destined to turn heads and enhance Brand Warren. The ubiquitous “celebripastor,” who hosted the Saddleback Civil Forum on Global Health for World AIDS Day at the Newseum in Washington, DC—where he will be honoring President Bush with an “international medal of p…
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…art of a common Muslim world, and a shared peoplehood, which is apparently best expressed by suffocating any expression of dissent, going to war with one’s co-religionists, and demonizing opponents. If not brutally murdering them. If ever there were a need for some kind of secularizing sentiment, it would be here. But let’s also not forget that secularism emerged in religious communities—to prevent them from tearing themselves apart—and as such wa…
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…s, and single-issue groups that make up a loose coalition that despite the best efforts of the Religion-Industrial Complex, cheerfully and successfully resists just about anything in the way of central coordination. Jenkins sees this as a distributed movement, and likes to point to areas where it’s played a crucial role in progressive successes in recent years. (Some of his most interesting reporting has been about Indigenous religious activism ar…
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…ht be transferable to other types of available labor, and to “build on the best practices learned from Katrina and Rita.” A United Neighborhoods Approach Some of those best practices were honed at the Mary Queen Viet Nam church, where those helping to rebuild gathered, eating together from their own hands for months in the flood’s aftermath. They didn’t stop at bricks and mortar; community activism gave birth to organizations such as the Mary Quee…
Read More…rsonal choice between you and the god or gods you don’t believe in. What’s best about America, though, is that each person, religious or not, has the right to be treated with both equality and equity by their government (though they may have to fight for that right to be recognized). I find it odd, though, that those who make the best arguments for the separation of church and state are most often those trying to marry the two until death do us al…
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…these conversations,” said Stutman, “and I still think synagogues are the best place for them.” Co-sponsored by J Street, the school’s J Street U chapter, and the New Israel Fund, the event was titled “Test of the Crisis in Gaza: Who We Are and What’s Next?,” an acknowledgement of the unprecedented polarization of American Jews produced by this summer’s war in Gaza. Stutman is, along with over 840 other rabbis and cantors, a member of the Rabbini…
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…at for certain.” As the tears fell he shook his head and said, “That’s the best answer anyone has given me.” Your response shows how much people are longing for that honesty. I’ve become someone who doesn’t leave people alone in their grief unless they want to be left alone. I call it the “sit with.” We’ve adopted it from Judaism, to sit shiva. You’re only allowed to make certain comments, and they have to be from Psalms, Lamentations or Ecclesias…
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…Cory Doctorow’s “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”—probably the anthology’s best story—it’s a synchronistic series of unconnected acts of terrorism. The most original set-up is in Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” in which a virus wipes out the human race’s ability to use and comprehend language. Elsewhere the cause of the apocalypse is ambiguous—something best illustrated in Gene Wolfe’s “Mute,” in which two children watch news reports about a mys…
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…sm as an impulsive, populist, misdirected explosion of anger from below is best encapsulated, as noted above, in the pogrom. Across Jewish history, Jews have often been the scapegoat for the economic disenfranchisement of the mass classes, who have their righteous anger projected onto an imagined picture of “the Jew.” Pogroms are a part of our ancestral memory, memorialized in everything from folklore to liturgies, and are archetypal for how we un…
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…of unfettered market capitalism, private property, or the common good. At best we hear a plea for an amorphous middle class, while the poor simply fade from view. We missed a chance for careful structural analysis of how the economy works, who profits and who loses. Now is the time to use our economic knowledge to provide for everyone, not revel in the ignorance of Joe Six-Pack about some mysterious system that is beyond us all. No one risks a go…
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