Religion Dispatches
…ause she zeroed in on Santorum’s comment that contraception is “harmful to women.” But note also what he says right before that: “I don’t think it works.” So in the course of one minute, Santorum said he voted to fund contraception, even though he thinks it doesn’t work and is harmful to women. Genius! …
Read More…w she decided to construct her lede. Leaving aside the monk argument for a minute, discipline and practices are a large part of studies in religion. In our department at Penn, it happens to be an interest of several of our professors, including myself. Prof. McDaniel also taught this course at his previous institution, so he had a good sense about what happens to students through the course of the semester. The conversation we had as a department…
Read More…f one graduating class from the police academy—and that Kelly sat for a 90 minute interview expressly for the film. And we’re supposed to believe that police force, in part of it’s counterterrorism training, used a film from a DHS contractor that they didn’t vet, and that they didn’t know who the contractor was. Imagine this scenario: A man walks into a building in NYC. No one knows who he is. No one asks his name. He has a package. He says eat it…
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…staccato prose style best lends itself to recitation via the people’s microphone, they might puzzle over a video clip date-stamped October 6, when Jeff Mangum, the man behind the beloved indie rock band Neutral Milk Hotel, treated the occupiers in Zuccotti Park to an eight song solo set. Dressed in a shaggy Nordic sweater and dark Mao-ish cap, Mangum looked the very model of the modern hipster protest singer. But his lyrics—echoed by the crowd of…
Read More…olina voters, as evidenced by the boos at the CNN debate and dramatic last-minute reversals in the polls. No wonder Romney again let his prickly side come out during the debate. No wonder he’s feeling a bit defensive. His plan-ahead-work-hard-execute-precisely-and-smile strategy—equal parts technocrat and LDS corporate culture—isn’t working in the Palmetto state. South Carolina is no cakewalk for a wonky Yankee Mormon. This year, we did not witnes…
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…of authors, a “regret[table] failure” that was rectified only in 2010 by a minute of the AFSC Board restoring his name to that list. Martin Luther King relied on Rustin’s advice and expertise, but that did not always insulate the committed activist (or his role in the movement) from the climate of the time. Adam Clayton Powell, the powerful African American congressman from Harlem, threatened to spread false rumors that King and Rustin were having…
Read More…while listening to Russian-speaking Central Asians scream into their cell phones, all of which are so much cooler than mine; this particular virtual argument was about an order for an organic something that didn’t go through. I guess. Then halfway through my haircut, a South Asian man walks into the barbershop and sits two chairs down from me. He’s wearing a dark brown shalwar qameez, the clothes most commonly worn by people in the northwest of t…
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…e of “If I Can Dream” at his ’68 Comeback Special. Billy calls it a “three-minute miracle” and decides to deploy the song in one of their protests in part as a response to the commercialization of the song (and of singing, and of stardom) in American Idol. Yet they use this interpolation as an opportunity to think through the commercial signs that Billy himself uses in his physical evocation of Elvis. “I’m going to be radical, right now,” Billy cr…
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…spell conjuring the sensation of what a “miracle” it truly was: “This microphone is not an ordinary instrument / For it looks out on vistas wide indeed,” he wrote. “My voice commingles now with northern lights and asteroids and Alexander’s skeleton / With dead volcanoes and with donkey’s ears… / It drifts among whatever spirits pass across the night.” Corwin was the first radio scribe who wrote with full awareness of what this new medium meant and…
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…men; overscheduled and torn between conflicting demands that don’t allow a minute for introspection, contemplation, or the stillness from which groundedness is born? All these reasons are why the film claims women should do the practice. But Michael came to believe that they were documenting something momentous, and women were leading it. “As a man going to classes taught by men, I was getting the practice, but not the phenomenon,” he said. “Women…
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