Religion Dispatches
…measure, to assure that sexual desire won’t enter the picture. Celibacy is best, Paul opines. For those too weak–willed to take up such a life, marriage is a next-best alternative. Get to orgasm before you start to feel devilish desire. For desire is disordered, and it has been since Eden. This all assumes the point of view of the man in the relationship, of course; so do Reverend Young’s dismissive allusions to back rubs and walks in the park. Fe…
Read More…arismatic hero is simply not true to the best of Southern populism. At our best, people in the South have agitated for change in break rooms, classrooms, prison yards and such, pausing for rallies rather than mistaking rallies for the real thing. While well-orchestrated arrests of large groups, at the instruction of a religious leader, may have the power of nostalgia, egalitarian democracy requires other models. It also does not matter to me wheth…
Read More…Additionally, the Fed Health could set standards for quality and coverage, promoting best practices and identifying the trade-offs on services. It would use information on the comparative clinical and cost effectiveness of different treatment options to set standards for Federal programs. The Congressional Budget Office recently credited this idea with the potential to produce substantial system-wide savings. Truly innovative stuff. Beyond that it…
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…king over our entertainment industry, you’ve appeared in some of America’s best-loved shows. You are even versatile enough to play brown, Muslim, American terrorists. But don’t you find your role in this most recent ad from Lowe’s truly objectionable? Here you are destroying the world’s natural resources to drive around town, and turn on an obscene number of lights. Doesn’t this offend your morality? Or do you truly have no shame? PC: Riz gets to…
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…tudents crave the moral direction and frisson of transcendence that Bellah promoted. I do not know how this affected his teaching at Berkeley, although he was a much beloved and popular professor there for many years. Bellah’s colleague, Walter Capps, though, taught the nationally famous Viet Nam War course at University of California, Santa Barbara, which perhaps we could see as reflecting Bellah’s vision for the study of religion. Whatever else…
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…saying how awful Setara is. A lot Afghans, like Setara’s father, want the best for their daughters but they’re not given a chance to speak. It’s a very difficult balance for those men; that they want the best for their daughters and yet they know that if their daughter goes on stage, her life is going to be in danger. Do you let her or do you make her stay at home? How would you respond to those who state that these clerics’ objections to Afghan…
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…ores Huerta. To my mind these leaders and all of the Elders constitute the best of the best in respect to role in shaping progressive social thought and redemptive nonviolent action. But there were two problems: (1) large numbers of Occupiers “don’t know much about history” and thus had no idea who was in their midst, and (2) large numbers of MSM people “don’t know much about history,” either, and thus found it possible to treat the Elders’ declar…
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…students in a myth of Christian exceptionalism and fear of Islam. Even the best publishers can fall victim to that pressure. It’s up to all of us to keep a close watch on what goes into public school textbooks. For scholars, that means ensuring that textbook content reflects the best available scholarly consensus. For parents and other citizens, it means identifying the decision-makers responsible for adopting textbooks (this will vary from state…
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…ed a rebuttal to the Vatican’s statement on the meeting, which is naïve at best. Staver lying at the Values Voters Summit about 100,000 people in Peru praying for Kim Davis proves that he’s willing to stretch a story to fit the narrative of Kim Davis as a Martyr and “conscientious objector.” No matter how much he may continue to assert that “Vatican officials approved the visit,” I would suspect the only Vatican official he most likely spoke with…
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…and soul. Every year since 2001, when San Francisco Bay area artist David Best constructed the first large-scale temple out of leftover pieces from a dinosaur puzzle factory, the temples have been a focal point for collective ritualizing at Burning Man. Dismounting my bicycle, I approached this year’s Temple of Transitions. Part medieval cathedral, part 24-hour desert sanctuary, the temple was epic in scale with stained glass windows on its upper…
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