Religion Dispatches
…when Mr. Freshwater burned a cross onto the arm of our child. This was done in science class in December 2007, where an electric shock machine was used to burn our child.” Dennis sighs on the phone when she thinks back on the past two years. “It’s changed our lives,” she said. “But I think we just had to do what’s right for our son. He was wronged.”…
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…Museum of American History as well as a prolific writer who has written a number of pieces for RD. Gordon Haber spoke to Manseau by phone. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Tell us about the Jefferson Bible. What is it? Why did he do it? Jefferson wanted to distill the Gospels down to core teachings of Jesus as a moral teacher. So he went through copies of the Bible and cut out with a penknife everything that had to do with J…
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…athematics exam. Others were less likely to let a classmate use their cell phone. “Some philosophical analyses may conclude that a fatalistic determinism is compatible with highly ethical behavior,” the psychologist Jesse Bering comments in an article on these studies, “but the present results suggest that many laypersons do not yet appreciate that possibility.” Theologians have proposed that science still allows faith in a “God of the gaps,” who…
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…f this book. It’s based on “hundreds of hours” of interviews in person, by phone, and online over three years. The pacing is fine, and by chapter 10 it becomes truly heartbreaking. Reading about people ruining their lives and the lives of their loved ones, over and again, is not a light read. In that sense it resembles an addiction memoir. This resemblance is made explicit in the afterword in which Cook argues that underneath the disinformation cr…
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…le’s boosters promise that the town has enough bed-and-breakfasts and cell phone towers to transform the eclipse into a comfortable tourist experience, there is a fundamental strangeness to the whole affair that no amount of merchandizing can fully defang. That it’s hard to reduce the weirdness of things like the eclipse hasn’t stopped Hopkinsville from trying. More than a half-century ago, on Monday, August 22, 1955, news media around the country…
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…re attempting to kill herself. Christensen claimed she was responding to a phone call from her husband, a pastor, who announced that the world was ending and to get the family ready. Cases such as this raise questions that have long gone unanswered about how the state should define “religion.” By what criteria should we decide whether deviant beliefs and actions are an expression of religion or evidence of a medical problem? Dr. Kolchak points out…
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…enders called such borrowers just a couple of years ago. They loved making phone calls that even their supremely unqualified mortgage applicants found somewhat hard to believe: “Congratulations: your loan has been approved! You will close in 15 minutes. And lucky you: there’s no need to show up or even supply a check. Everything is rolled right into the loan. Woo-hoo!” Yeah, we all went for it. We were approved so easily. Who doesn’t what to be “a…
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…fight. If someone had pressed into his fingers at that pivotal moment the phone number for The Trevor Project, he might reach out and hear a voice of reassurance, a voice that gave him hope for life by, in part, repudiating the so-called biblical teaching that who he is amounts to an offense against God. If he’d had a sense of belonging to a community that embraced him for who he is, maybe his hope wouldn’t be so fully shattered. But while other…
Read More…e same way it does regarding slavery, or viewing women as property, or any number of things that our culture no longer affirms or accepts. My perspective can best be summarized in a quote from my theological hero, John Caputo: “My own view is that the outcome of a careful debate about these matters would be to show that there simply are no arguments to show that homosexual love is of itself anything else than love, and that therefore, since the es…
Read More…ou need to know to keep on reading? I’d cheerfully watch that man read the phone book. So, when my buddy Rev. El Mundo sent me the link to the comedian’s message, I eagerly clicked on it. I was surprised when I saw this wasn’t a clip of his latest hysterical stand up, but an essay he penned for the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog. The topic of his essay was how he came to be an atheist. The whole piece is here. While there is humor in the pie…
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