Religion Dispatches
…onk Thich Nhat Hanh, and the Dalai Lama (who has publicly appealed to the Myanmar government to show “magnanimity and understanding” to “a fellow Buddhist.” Meanwhile, in the wake of the latest trouble—and as lawyers, politicians, and religious leaders fight for her release—a new barbed wire fence has been installed around her home….
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…on’t understand why such women don’t understand that the same men who will promote them over their progressive sisters can just as easily promote others over them. It is the power dynamic, not just the people, that is at issue here. Postmodern Catholicism is a different animal than its pre-Vatican II cousin. Catholics (women and men, lay and clerical, secular and religious) think for themselves, forming new syntheses of faith and solidarity. Nuns,…
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…for many fundamentalist and conservative evangelicals may well be just the latest, most visible evidence that Obama is antichrist. For others, as Frank Schaeffer suggested in another recent piece, opposing health care reform participates in a generations-long effort among evangelicals to aggrandize political power to themselves by obstructing democracy. More broadly, these examples of religious extremism exist on a continuum of disturbing response…
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…nce?); The Matrix Trilogy, as Adam Gopnik has pointed out, is probably the latest version of this story—a hero freeing human beings from their roles as organic batteries cultivated to power a race of evil machines. There is a more frightening proposition: that other people are in fact shadows cast on the wall. How do we know others are not a dream? Even observable behavior is a poor indicator. Take the fact of Kismet, a robot engineered at MIT to…
Read MoreOn the surface, Dan Gilgoff is right in his latest US News column to tout famous “ex-gay” Alan Chambers’ new interview with Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink as “striking.” But, when studied, the interview is simply more of the same from the “ex-gay” camp. What striking is that Chambers is not promoting so-called conversion therapy, which some religious conservatives claim can convert gays and lesbians to a straight sexual orientation. Rather, he…
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…re morally despicable. They are derogatory to women. Instead check out the latest Abercrombie catalogue, or the Victoria’s Secret fashion catalogue. (We understand if you can’t get to the swim special yet. We don’t want to be pushy.) It is now essential to check women in bandannas that are suspiciously like headscarves for racial background. White girls can wear bandannas because it is currently fashionable. Arab chicks have to take off the bandan…
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…int that the New Atheism crosses the line and undermines its own effort to promote critical thinking. The problem with an exclusively negative approach to religion is twofold. First, while it helps sell books, it risks promoting intolerance and potentially even hatred of religious people. Atheists will point out that they do not fly planes into buildings or murder doctors, as some religious fundamentalists have done. However, it takes one visit to…
Read More…are the activist leaders who help fan this grassroots support? Look at the latest anti-gay robocall in Michigan, and you’ll see a line straight from the American Family Association’s radical homophobia to Mike Huckabee. In the robocall, reported by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post, the head of AFA’s Michigan affiliate, Gary Glenn, and its affiliated Campaign for Michigan Families, repeatedly describes his target, Democratic state legislative candi…
Read More…of fear and resentment. How ugly is it getting? Check out Sharron Angle’s latest television ads which depict Reid as the ally of scowling, bandana-browed Latino gangstas and Angle as the ally of white schoolchildren and college graduates—an open appeal to the racist us-vs.-them sentiment that always surges during economic downtimes. It will not bode well for Mr. Romney if voter sentiments don’t simmer down before the Republican presidential prima…
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…ific concern. Camping has been buried by subsequent news cycles and is the latest member of a cadre of religious leaders whom the Apocalypse passed by. But while May’s Apocalypse seems to have skipped over most of the world, it did land squarely on a hilltop in north-western Vietnam. It would behoove us to take notice of the complex and unexpected ways in which this spring’s apocalypticism rippled across the world—in short radio waves, to be preci…
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