Search Results for:

VIPREG2024 best promo code for 1xbet Moldova

Please Reverend, Do Something About the Fat People

…lem, except it’s not. Aside from its connection to health being tenuous at best, obesity seems to be leveling off. 5. It might be compelling if there were any safe and reliable way to permanently turn most fat people into thin people. But there seems not to be. Of the people that lose a lot of weight, the vast majority—like nearly all of them—gain it back. Many have a little extra weight to show for their troubles. Some have seriously screwed-up m…

Read More

RDBook: Bernard Avishai’s The Hebrew Republic

…hand of partnership. To the contrary, Israel’s very existence remains, at best, resentfully accepted and, at worst, is the target of attack. That’s not an atmosphere where nationalism can be replaced by regionalism, no matter what happens inside Israel. Even in the advent of peace with the Palestinians and the establishment of relations with the Arab League nations, it will be many years before true acceptance of Israel takes hold and some time a…

Read More

Why the Next Archbishop of Canterbury Should Be African

…ld. Johnson’s disappointment about the future of the Nigerian Church could best be applied to England, where fewer and fewer people attend church and surveys show young people don’t see the need for faith. The European Union’s constitution omits any mention of Christianity, the historic faith of the continent. Yet Europe still controls the leadership roles in the Church. The Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury—leaders of two of Christianity’s la…

Read More

RDPulpit: Rick Warren and the Limits of Empathy

…celebrity and the moniker “America’s Pastor,” are largely the product of a best-selling self-help devotional, The Purpose Driven Life. Stunning skeptical publishers, the book has sold 25 million copies and is, according to Publisher’s Weekly, the best selling hardback in American history. Revenue from the book has enabled Warren to stop drawing a salary and to refund the 25 years of salary he’d already drawn. Furthermore, the huge sums that contin…

Read More

The Kids are Religious Right: Punk Rock & Pro-Life

…-oriented popular culture, especially music. Planned Parenthood is perhaps best understood as representing the larger successes of liberal feminism, the movement primarily responsible for legalizing abortion. Rock for Life does not see abortion as a women’s rights issue; to them it is a social and cultural issue which affects everyone. Even though the group readily engages the issues of unwed mothers and teen pregnancy, they frame their argument s…

Read More

The Visceral Vote: Obama-as-Sojourner v. McCain-as-Mythic-Hero

…tary, and national security. That’s the one area where McCain consistently bests his opponent in the polls. It’s only his claim to experience on these issues that are keeping him competitive. That does not mean the voters prefer McCain’s war policies. Since last February, when it became clear that the Arizona senator would be the GOP’s nominee, the pattern has not changed: Even when a comfortable majority of those polled support Obama’s policy — w…

Read More

Let’s Get Lost: Mapping Religion in the 21st Century

…r, neither an omniscient narrator nor Emersonian Invisible Eyeball, is, at best, a recorder in a room, for a limited amount of time and recording on only one wavelength. We have the sounds of cooking, but not the smell or the taste of that fried fish. While offering us what we would otherwise not hear, this project also highlights limitations that are always on us. Such mapping exemplifies what anthropologist John L. Jackson, Jr. calls “thin descr…

Read More

“Ex-Gay” Common Ground More of a Killing Ground

…point is that people can leave whatever it is that God calls less than His best and move into something that is His best, becoming more like He is. Honestly, this isn’t news. So-called “ex-gay ministries” have long given up the promise of turning homosexuals into heterosexuals. True, some who say they’ve “left homosexuality” have married opposite gender partners and had children. Here we can begin the long argument over Alfred Kinsey and his conti…

Read More

Media Fail to Acknowledge That 2024 Hopeful Ron DeSantis is as Catholic as Biden

…beliefs and whether they run directly counter to well-established medical best practices. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is exactly why I object to the media’s differential treatment of liberal Catholic politicians and right-wing Catholic politicians. Journalists’ and editors’ pervasive framing choices in this regard both reflect and perpetuate the too-little acknowledged Christian privilege that permeates American civil society. They do…

Read More

Take the Van Gogh Challenge: Doctor Who Part VII

…primarily about describing the world as it is (although it should take our best understanding of the natural world into account), but about depicting the world as it could be, and transforming it into that better vision of reality. And of course, when religion takes a harmful view of the future, it can often contribute to bringing about a minor apocalypse. This episode ended with the Doctor and Amy not having managed to prevent Van Gogh’s suicide,…

Read More