Religion Dispatches
…Having a husband meant that they could not give their ultimate all for the number one man on most African-American womens’ lips, and it’s not Denzel. It’s Jesus. For many women in churches like COGIC, being in love with Jesus means that most other men, whether desirable as a husband or not, stood in the way of the number one relationship. One person I interviewed even had a name for it: “being loosed” from your husband to do the Lord’s work. “Bein…
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…Truth.”⁴ Other TTT comments were just plain false: “Islam is spread by the sword while monotheistic religions are not.”⁵ (Try telling that to an Aztec or Inca—not to mention the fact that Islam is a “monotheistic religion.”) Yet despite TTT’s lack of credentials and the obviously biased and tendentious nature of their critiques, conservative SBOE members insisted that publishers give them the same level of attention they gave comments from credent…
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…that almost bit Jimmy Carter in the middle of a lake. Looks like a bunny, swims like a—hey, wait a minute! Rabbits can’t swim! That’s our clue that this killer rabbit is a hybrid, part bunny, part shark. Which is to say, sort of like the fundamentalism that sought power post-Scopes trial by building up a social movement of para-church organizations, educational institutions, and, most understudied by academic scholars—an elite cadre, best exempli…
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…n times more people than watched the Democratic Presidential debates. That number, combined with 36 million liberal Protestants (with “growing irrelevancy”), is just a bit below the viewership for the Super Bowl. As to causes of decline, if we move to the margins of demonic institutions does this slow it down or speed it up? He calls for greater vitality on the left, and I agree that this is better than steering right or being tepid—but at best wh…
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…the sheer scale of the Second World War; and because of the unprecedented number of documents preserved in hundreds of archives and libraries across dozens of countries, this is obviously not the case. The second is that there’s little to no reality behind popular cultural representations of the Nazi supernatural. While many of these representations are exaggerated or erroneous, many others have some basis in reality. In the case of Hitler’s Mons…
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…of popular culture until the late twentieth century when it was tied to a number of social trends, including the rise of the 1960s British-American counterculture and the concomitant appeal of yoga’s South Asian roots, changes in global consumer culture toward a consumer-oriented approach to spirituality and wellness among bourgeois urban dwellers, and the continued Orientalist gaze that pictured yoga as the spiritual filler to a Western cultural…
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…o bishops were present, along with some twenty priests and a roughly equal number of religious brothers and sisters. Several hundred people packed the pews and dozens more squeezed into the space in the back of the church, with news crews roving the aisles. Before the opening procession, the emcee led us in the Angelus prayer. The Mass then opened with a mournful-sounding dirge in Tagalog, “Buksan Ang Aming Puso” (“Open Our Hearts”). The readings…
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…. Luckily, Weir offers a treasure trove of short stories on his website, a number of which break with The Martian’s goal of approximating reality, grappling instead with some of the same issues that we discuss here at The Cubit. Without further ado, here are the top three short stories for anyone jonesing for more Weir: Bored World. The story of a mischievous, trans-dimensional plane of existence. Is this a god, or the story of sci-fi itself? Anti…
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…2,223 people have been killed in gun-related incidents in the U.S. and the number of people fatally shot by American police officers approaches 1,000. Pointing out a national moral failure and theological treason is not “prayer shaming.” We must raise our voices in the key of hope until Capitol Hill sees what we see: preventable social and personal pain caused by guns. I am reminded that as Jesus prepared his disciples for his death (a state-spons…
Read More…aception. So is the salient difference the size of the list? Is there some number of things-this-paper-can-be-used-for that puts the employer at a safe moral distance from the act, where previously they had been complicit? If so, what’s the number? How long does the list of possible uses have to be to assuage the employer’s conscience enough to let the employees use their compensation for things the employer finds morally repugnant? See, here’s th…
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