Religion Dispatches
…incomparably marvelous book, a treasury of good soul medicine. So, let us welcome Stephen Levine’s return to poetry. Breaking the Drought can also refer to a return to one of humanity’s most ancient of spiritual practices: sacred speech. As such, it’s a link back to a continuity temporarily severed by the Technological Revolution. It is a link we need in order to live in a fragmented world, dislocated by loss of spiritual unity. Meanwhile, with s…
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…clesiastically robust Penance app has managed. (Note to developers: You’re welcome.) Nonetheless, even more careful, socially-sensitive design cannot be guaranteed to save the doctrinal day in a world defined much more by improvisation than by obedience. That is, regardless of how developers intend for an application to be used, the very nature of the culture shaped by digital social media allows that users will come up with new, creative, and, in…
Read More…high school clubs. Next up: atheists. The Secular Student Alliance, which promotes atheism and humanism with chapters at more than 200 colleges, is sending in reinforcements for teen free-thinkers—a push to launch 50 new high school clubs. Godless teens want the same social benefits that evangelical teens find at the annual “See you at the pole” flagpole prayer events at thousands of schools every September, and the court-sanctioned afterschool B…
Read More…d him to do a guest stint at RD. He graciously accepted, and we’re glad to welcome him. ________________________ Just when you thought that “new atheism” marked a radical turn in nonconformist thought, along comes an even more rebellious concept of religious dissent: misotheism. What I’ve tried to do in my work is to take the lid off this simmering, largely repressed stew of blasphemy — and to do away, for good, with the false notion that atheists…
Read More…Uganda” over the bill, I asked him how the U.N. and other “lobbyists” were promoting homosexuality in Uganda; not surprisingly, he didn’t have an answer. He claimed that the pastors there told him “a story about how it swept into — the agenda promotion, of the agenda, and now the actual proliferation of the homosexual activity sweeping into the boarding schools of that nation. I don’t know much of the details so I can’t take responsibility for wha…
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…llectual, and spiritual relatedness in which the faithful should engage is welcome. But, as Ritchie pointed out in his blog, the Pope’s letter errs in assuming that digital media are the particular provenance of the young. While it’s true that more than 90 percent of teens use the internet, usage by adults has climbed some 30 percent over the past decade, with nearly 80 percent using the internet. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Proj…
Read More…Tea-Party ideologues. (Not to mention a few liberals.) And that would be a welcome reminder indeed. Years ago, a high-ranking LDS Church official was reported to have compared working with Elder Boyd K. Packer to trying to “stage manage a grizzly bear.” In October 2010, after Elder Packer delivered a highly controversial and bruising talk on LGBT issues at the Church’s global General Conference, grizzly bears indeed may have been stage managed. Pa…
Read More…e window So she can see it from the road With all the loving in your heart Welcome her back home. The Docs’ keening for a fallen innocent seems all too prescient, given the recent negotiations over revelations of priestly sexual abuse of both girls and boys. In all, the Saw Doctors have produced seven studio albums and thirty number one singles. Music critics have compared the band’s effect to that of the Grateful Dead and Bruce Springsteen becaus…
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…stians. This seems obvious, but apparently it bears repeating: a season of welcome and sharing, regardless of the religious beliefs of those who observe it, is a good thing. This is why it seems nonsensical that some pugnacious conservatives want to insist that those around them ignore the long history of this season and portray it as explicitly and exclusively Christian. It is not, and should not be. Just as Christians need the imperatives of Adv…
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…phrase ‘elder brothers,’ which had already been used by John XXIII, is not welcome to Jews. The reason is that, in the Jewish tradition, the ‘elder brother’—Esau—is also the brother who gets rejected. One can still use it, because it expresses an important point. But it is true that they are also our ‘fathers in the faith.’ And this way of putting it illustrates perhaps even more clearly the character of our relationship to each other. Still, in r…
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