Religion Dispatches
I start my day like every Muslim does. By checking my phone. Breitbart, though, is hardly the first, second, or even third website I’ll check. Actually Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos’ “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the AltRight” might be the first Breitbart essay to have held my attention. But it did more than that. There’s always a few articles we come across, perhaps every month, that don’t just engage us, but force us to go bac…
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…performed and witnessed through cameras, at a distance of hundreds or thousands of miles. Veteran suicides come to outnumber battlefield deaths. Violence shifts even deeper into the realm of psychology: there’s the pervasive fear of a possible strike, existing alongside the lasting legacy of combat. The final chapters of the Hunger Games series concern themselves with trauma and its aftermath, in unusually naked terms (“I still remain struck with…
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…tical point of view that we would be the only ones. There are probably thousands and thousands of other life forms far more advanced than us in the universe just given the sheer numbers. Given how close we are to developing artificial intelligence right now, it’s also easy to think that another species did that on a planet somewhere far away and changed the universe. Given the fact that we’ll have A.I. in two hundred years that will potentially be…
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…, to a large extent, unmapped: the terra incognita in our skulls. Over the phone, Eagleman spoke with The Cubit about traumatic brain injuries, the idea of possibilianism, and the language we use to describe our brains. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. In The Brain, you do a good job of depicting the fragility of our experience of reality. Am I right to be a little scared by this instability? [Laughs] Well, you know, it’s one…
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…for shying away from hot-button religious culture war battles, “visited by phone” with Rowan County, Kentucky court clerk Kim Davis yesterday, according to a statement issued by his campaign. “I let her know how proud I am of her for not abandoning her religious convictions and standing strong for religious liberty,” the former pastor, Arkansas governor, and now two-time presidential candidate said in a statement. Arguing that “the Supreme Court c…
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…ren kept going to safety. They fled to the Sinjar mountains along with thousands of other Yazidi refugees. After many days, she said, the Kurdish militant movement, the PKK, opened a corridor of safety for them to escape. She has heard reports that teenage girls were taken to warehouses where they were auctioned off to “old men” who bought them as sex slaves. Some were bought for no more than a thousand Iraqi dinars, which amounts to less than a U…
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…nsidering new ways of “being church.” His vision is a bold one, but on the phone he quietly shrugs it off, saying it’s just a continuation of the Congregational tradition of more than 400 years. ________________ Frederick Clarkson: In Beyond Resistance you say that we are living in the dawning of a “postmodern” age of Christianity that may last for 500 years. What kind of church do you see emerging? Dorhauer: The first thing I want to say about th…
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…me and rejection that comes when one of our own wanders or falls away. The phone calls stop, the texts cease, and the friendships end (scriptures such as Matthew 5:30; Matthew 18:15-17; and 1 Corinthians 5:1-13 are usually cited as reasons for “radical” acts of amputation). But how are we defining what is radical? Are we only radical when it comes to sexual sin? Are we radical in our love for the poor? Throughout the Hebrew Bible and the New Testa…
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…y and the tears, of Barack Obama’s triumph—of that unforgettable moment in Chicago’s Grant Park when it really did feel that this sad old country had finally turned a corner with the election of an African-American president. All of that seems very far away now. But these days I find myself asking white friends and colleagues to remember what they felt then. I do this precisely to invite them to consider what’s wrong with sentimental liberalism. A…
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…sitives up in the cities. Best case scenario for Dems would be fore Bernie Sanders to win the nomination, thereby automatically scooping up the Prius vote in Madison, followed by a visit with the liberal Archbishop Cupich in Chicago. Trump would be infuriated and pick a fight with Cupich; Pope Francis would come to his defense, Waukesha voters would be disgusted, and that would be that. That’s a silly scenario, of course, but the serious point is…
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