Religion Dispatches
…those of us whose lifestyles are dependent upon a ‘religious’ devotion to cheap oil. The deepest irony of all is that BP, along with the other oil companies, has come to function as a god. The truth, buried beneath all the oil and punditry, is that our devotion to this false god has led to the suffering of innocents, in the oceans and beaches, in the marshes and ecosystems, and in our communities. We have been slow, too slow by far, to realize th…
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…e sentimental process which transformed dogs from work animals into family pets. (For more on this, see my essay on Lassie in The Wow Climax) Of course, my ever practical wife suggests another explanation—that Zoe has been playing with the dog in her search for human contact and so he turns to her with the ball, not knowing that he risks blowing her cover. I suppose this would suggest a dog owner who can’t resist their attachments to the pet, anot…
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…estication that we now have health insurance on offer for wealthy domestic pets while billions of other creatures in our care are heedlessly slaughtered. Our domestication practices are a disaster. Domestication as an approach to interspecies conflict does not seem like the most valuable lesson to learn from Francis. A wolf at the outskirts of a human community in the contemporary U.S. would not be met with a leash and a bowl. Francis wasn’t quite…
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…narrative that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating people’s pets. Citing the bomb threats that shut down local schools after former president Donald Trump emphasized the talking point in his September 10 debate with Kamala Harris, Moore writes: When we are willing to see children terrorized rather than stop telling lies about their families, we should step back, forget about our dogs and cats for a moment, and ask who abducted our c…
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…e case, team blue claimed it won, and team red said something about eating pets and distancing itself from JD Vance. High and lowlights for me included: According to Trump, Biden has a 4-sentence plan that Harris is copying, and it’s based on the classic book Run, Spot, Run. “Take a look at her plan. She doesn’t have a plan.” Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, are basically the new Riggs and Murtaugh of DC because they’re gun owners. Harris’ “…
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…isode we learn that the man who so despised tattoos, but had a significant number of them, acquired most of them in a short period of time, and acquired many through a particular practice in the back room of his own clock workshop. Paying one hundred dollars an hour to a tattoo artist, McLemore submitted to the needle, sometimes for a new piece, sometimes merely for more ink on top of old, a tattoo sunk on top of an existing tattoo, turning his bo…
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…g jealously towards one’s friends is deplorable. He’s a strong advocate of pets (“the brute is more content with mere existence than is a human”), good manners, and “eating and drinking proportionately.” In the final chapter, “The Good,” he provides a long list of the necessities to live “a good life”: “honour, self-mastery, wisdom, loyalty, justice, sympathy, and kindness.” It’s hard to argue with that. The Good Book doesn’t call for a new religi…
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…hree or four spouses?” Gibbs asked. “Maybe people will want to marry their pets or robots.” Gibbs’s father founded the Christian Law Association. Gibbs represented Terry Schiavo’s parents when they were trying to wrest guardianship away from her husband. Since then Gibbs has represented a high school trying to prevent students from organizing a gay-straight alliance club Other speakers will include Brendan Bain from Jamaica-based Family Life Minis…
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…his species has been enslaved and degraded for so long). There are also a number of “children’s cartoons” that are really aimed at older children and adults, meant to speak to both groups on different levels. Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time, for instance, is a children’s fantasy show in which a boy and his dog go on quests. The stories are simple enough to appeal to a younger audience, but the writers manage to throw in a good deal of mulling ov…
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…oint identified simply as “Christianity,” with no modifier required. 10. Pets in Heaven. I’m only slightly kidding here, but Francis says he’s cool with it, and the furry ones already seem to be everywhere in spaces from which they were once automatically barred: airplane cabins and restaurants and supermarket aisles. There’s a serious issue here, inasmuch as the church has always held that a basic qualification for entry through the pearly gate…
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