Religion Dispatches
…! Studios has announced a new comic series conceived by actor-turned-evangelist Stephen Baldwin, Comic List reports. BOOM!’s press release describes The Remnant as “A supernatural thriller in the vein of 24,” but the title suggests it’ll be more of a Left Behind knock-off—indeed, it shares its Revelation-inspired title with the tenth book in the Left Behind series. Baldwin states of the series: “I wanted to do a comic that asked the big questions…
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…ade a majority of Californians to heed one element in an otherwise obscure list of purity codes in Deuteronomy—and that Jesus’ preaching in the gospels isn’t really complete without Paul’s finger-wagging in Romans—the stitching that holds together the disparate parts of the Good Book will have subtly but irrevocably loosened, along with the Bible’s centuries-old grip on American public life. Of course, religious conservatives can’t frame their pro…
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From the pantheon of Greco-Roman names in the cast list to the hard-drinking antics of the pagan crew, there is a distinct Dionsysian vibe on the critically adored Battlestar Galactica, now entering its final season on the Sci-Fi channel. There’s no character named Dionysus, it’s true, but we have straight-arrow flyboy Apollo and Cylon turncoat Athena and her existentially tormented human lover, Karl Agathon. Then there’s the simple fact that the…
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…o much baggage. When you use it, everybody thinks of this theistic, personalistic, transcendent God—no, I don’t buy that. The way I always define the divine is the rising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away or, as I have already suggested, the infinite creative process. There isn’t a divine creator, but creativity is divine. Creativity is an emergent process, and creation always entails destruction. I’ve rethought this in ter…
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…regularly opining that God is punishing America for some sins. Only their list of sins for which America deserves punishment is different from those of Wright. In the words of Christian fundamentalist Jerry Falwell, “I really believe the pagans, the abortionists, the feminists, the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, the People for the American Way, all of them who tried to secularize America, I p…
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…a access is also controlled. Monks (like all Tibetans) are prohibited from listening to the Tibetan language broadcasts of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, and members of the clergy especially are subject to interrogation and punishment if caught. —The government sees itself as having the right to implement “patriotic re-education” campaigns of ideological indoctrination whenever this is seen as necessary (see below). What is more, only a spe…
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…and DignityUSA, a group working for LGBT rights in the Church, topped the list. However, if you search for “homosexual,” an organization called Courage comes up. Courage is an organization which tried to convince gay and lesbian Catholics to be chaste. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to “save the children” from that anti-Catholic blasphemy out in cyberspace. Heaven forbid they know what a condom is! At least some organ…
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…avoidance activities; 75% hire outside consultants (union-prevention specialists) who set up command centers within the company to wage all-out war on the union; 50% threaten to shut down operations to scare workers; and 25% illegally fire union supporters. These aren’t just economic issues or labor abuses; they are human rights issues, and they were recognized as such in a Human Rights Watch report issued in 2000. In the years since that report c…
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…that prompted the readers to indulge me—the book stayed on the bestseller list for nineteen weeks. Sand explains this sharp split among his book’s Israeli readers by pointing to a widening gulf between Israeli’s public intellectuals, many of whom are critical of a strident nationalism based on Jewish ethnic solidarity, and his colleagues in the large history departments of Israeli universities, who are enmeshed in an academic system that separat…
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…stern conception of women’s rights over the Muslim one.” Sadly, this journalist-turned-polemicist is hailed by Faoud Ajami in the New York Times as a clarion voice who “has written the most sustained and thoughtful treatment of the subject (immigration, Islam, and the West) to date.” Pace that high-five imprimatur for one of its own guild, Caldwell is less an objective journalist than an alarmist rhetorician. He clogs the reader with untrammeled,…
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