Religion Dispatches
…ountry has squandered its promise. I think people in America sold out very cheaply, for sneakers and cheeseburgers.” Another time he paralleled the product with piety. “I think this species had great, great promise, with this great upper brain that we have, and I think we squandered it on God and Mammon.” Most remembrances of Carlin have lingered on his wicked wordplay and obscenity. As Slate’s Joshua David Mann remarked, “He got almost 30 years o…
Read More
…ate the house and prepare refreshments. On the appointed evening, a mob of dirty, profane teens swarmed into the house, breaking and destroying the furnishings. During the course of the evening, Mrs. Holloway said something that angered Becky. The girl struck her mother and left her lying in a pool of blood in the bathroom. Discipline by pain, or lack thereof in the case of Becky and the Holloways, becomes a nexus between parenting and politics. D…
Read More
…American presidential election. What I inadvertently touched on with my 4-minute, no-budget video was the growing divide in American culture, religion and politics that (according to some well-respected observers) threatens the viability of American Democracy. Beneath the most obvious and salacious details of the scandal lies a Christian subculture that, like a vast chunk of Antarctic ice, had years before begun to diverge from the mainstream mas…
Read More
…larger than Methodists, Episcopalians and Lutheran combined and double the number of “nones” since that last such survey in 1990. And among the 18- to 29-year-old demographic—the leading edge of a new generation of spiritually and technologically iconoclastic seekers and the core audience for media convergence phenomena like Battlestar—“nones” account for a quarter of the total population and an even higher portion of men. Even as traditional bric…
Read More…stitute has already weighed in. Much of it misses the point. In the ninety minute documentary, Stein frames the creation/evolution discussion as a First Amendment Issue: look at all these scientists who were ostracized by the scientific community because they claim Intelligent Design may have some truth to it. Just the making of this documentary has come complete with charges of misrepresentation, with some scientists interviewed for the film sayi…
Read More
…e the Oscars of the Internet. We’ve been honored with a Webby nomination a number of times before and it never gets old. But… we confess we’re starting to nurture a bit of a Susan Lucci complex — always a nominee, never (yet) a winner. In the past we’ve lost to much larger media outlets (such as the public network that rhymes with “Zee Bee Ess”) and this year are up against the likes of Krista Tippett’s “On Being” and others. So, here’s where you…
Read More
…mpromising the integrity of an indigenous organization’s work? There are a number of organizations that are really good at channeling aid to women working at the grassroots. The Global Fund for Women, for example, does amazing work. On a more macro scale, people in developed countries often have access to levers of power that people on the ground don’t. Agnes Pareyio’s story is instructive. She’s an amazing Masai woman in Kenya who runs a shelter…
Read More
…, the narrator declared, “The Jewish people are coming to Christ in record numbers.” The goal of some Christian Zionist and Messianic Jewish groups is the repatriation of all Jews to Israel, and the conversion of all Jews to Christ. Saturday afternoon’s sermons reflected those hopes. The Jewish humor of David Chernoff, one of the Messianic movement’s most prominent rabbis, fell flat when he addressed the crowd. The mostly gentile audience just did…
Read More…the fasting day, at maghrib, sunset. At no other time in the year is this minute so closely watched. Imagine: even in the busiest cities in the world, if they have majority Muslim populations, everything stops. My first time living in Cairo I left during Ramadan, and the night before my departure (because I was on my vacation days), I literally walked down a silent major road and said out loud “goodbye, Cairo!” because everyone else was inside br…
Read More…the same point again, only more obnoxiously. I’ll bottom-line it in just a minute, but here’s the theological set up. According to Walter Brueggemann (reading the Exodus narrative), “static religious triumphalism” funds a politics of “human oppression and exploitation.” That probably seems opaque, but the point is simple. When God (or the gods) guarantee and legitimize the social order, they inevitably come to represent the interests of the wealth…
Read More