Religion Dispatches
…called upon by athletes in the will to overpower opponents and by fans in search of saving grace before the final seconds tick off the clock. Instead, the big game has empowering, memorable ritual vitality in the lives of participants and spectators whether God accompanies them to the game or not; it possesses value-laden drama in the game itself but also in the pre- and post-game activities, all of which teach moral lessons that transcend the ga…
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…ernment should enter into peace negotiations with the big drug cartels, in search of something analogous to the Salvadoran Peace Accords reached in 1992. A Place of Death and Dying The global public, confronted with the spectacle of this violence, has responded with a morbid and anxious curiosity, on the one hand, and a mute indifference on the other. Perhaps this should come as no surprise. Mexico has long been a place of violence, death and dyin…
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…looks suspiciously like an attempt to wear a burqini, we may need to strip search you to establish whether you are indeed emancipated or still a slave to medieval clothing practices. Note: Your unwillingness to be strip-searched may reveal you as an Islamic extremist. Winter-wear should avoid excesses of weather-protection. An Arab woman dressed in a thick coat, a fur hat and a large scarf may be interrogated. Temperatures should be well below fre…
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…ead more widely, though—men were also curious about birth and generation.) Cheaply printed and soon translated from German into vernacular languages across Europe, the Rose Garden became a durable best-seller. For midwives, the Rose Garden’s images fulfilled a practical need. Midwives (and other birth attendants) sensed the position of the fetus through touch. When a fetus presented in a position other than head down, a skilled midwife could, in s…
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…erry Garcia’s nine fingers ouija-boarded across the frets of his guitar in search of a lost chord. His fingers leading by following, Jerry peered over his reflective sunglasses at bandmates Mickey Hart, Bob Weir, and Phil Lesh. They squinted back at him and at each other, and in turn sought the crowd’s unspoken input as the music followed a tune played by a harp unstrung to a destination sensed intensely yet unknown…. Caminante, son tus huellas el…
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…dog-whistle politics” and noted that he himself had received an increased number of “jabs” for his faith in recent months. Thus Trump’s EO on immigration has shed a clear spotlight on what many advocates and legislators mean when they use the phrase “religious freedom”—and what they don’t. Furthermore, no one in the room seemed to have fully grappled with the fact that expanding a right to religious accommodations may come back to haunt conservat…
Read More…e I expected the answers would be the other way around,” is a conundrum in search of a question and a sampling frame (i.e. a representative group of evangelical leaders and/or evangelicals). The findings have been misinterpreted, and the reporters, bloggers and commentators have spread the gospel of (what seems to have become) a de facto evangelical point of view that may not be true. Did the anecdotal transubstantiate into dogma overnight? *The E…
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…tions. I have to wonder whether the leadership—both the church council and search committee—was able to have courageous conversations about precisely those key issues you raise: What has been assumed but not discussed in respect to racial and religious identity here? What is distinctively Christian at this institution that is trying to be responsive to a diverse metropolis and to the broader progressive community (whatever that means)? And how do…
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…In this book, Darwin raised the key issues that would thereafter occupy researchers in the field. Darwin’s basic case for human evolution consisted of two main parts. First, he presented the by-then well known evidence for the evolution of the human body. In anatomical structure and embryonic development, people resemble other animals, he noted, and the persistence of monkey-like rudimentary features (such as the tailbone) reinforced the conclusi…
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…than two years after a mob had ransacked the Capitol, screaming “Nancy” in search of the then-Speaker. The gallows had already been set up in front of the Capitol. Violence is the catharsis which conspiracy movements like QAnon promise: that the evil-doers will be punished, echoing the “Day of the Rope” in the neo-Nazi bible The Turner Diaries, which in many ways has provided a blueprint for the attack on the Capitol, as historian Kathleen Belew h…
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