Religion Dispatches
…at is logical. I can’t help feeling that there is a connection between the loss of tortured-yet-sympathetic repression and the loss of political consciousness in the recent Star Trek. Our society, and consequently our science fiction, has gotten so uncomfortable with self-discipline that Data needs an emotion chip and Spock needs to go in for Primal Scream therapy. Meanwhile, politics goes off the map. What were once complex enemy societies that m…
Read More…ones has any brains at all – and I’m not saying he does – he’ll get on the phone to the ACLU right now, begging its attorneys to take his case. What’s so incredibly stupid about all of this is that it seems like the community couldn’t have more bungled the handling of this raging bigot. Now, Jones – who is obviously one of the biggest spotlight-seeking jerks out there – will be made into a martyr and now stands to make a lot of money from the taxp…
Read More…” The Washington Post reports this morning that Democratic Senators, on a phone call yesterday with White House senior advisor David Plouffe, argued against adopting the Bishops’ position. My source says it’s “not a done deal” yet, but expected action from the White House within a week. UPDATE: Another womens’ rights advocate tells me that she has “no reason to think” that the Obama administration feels it “owes” the Bishops for health care refo…
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…r to the ground, “nudged” him with a nightstick, or pepper sprayed him at close range. He’s certainly mindful of the difference between his stage and that of the protesters, but Makana sees the same spirit of aloha—a spirituality lost, like so many Hawai’ian protest songs, on many outsiders—as animating even angry dissent with love: It takes great courage and self-sacrifice to protest something that you feel is unjust and is causing harm to people…
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…w are you going to announce it over social media if you don’t have a smart phone? And smartphones: they are helpful, but they are also limited. I’m working with some of my guides to develop what’s called a WisePhone, and it’s smarter than a smartphone. What are some of the features of the WisePhone? You won’t lose it anymore because it won’t be influenced by gravity, so it won’t fall down the cracks of your couch. It will also be able to tweet or…
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…e supremacist movements.” I catch up with the Rev. David Ostendorf by cell phone while he is waiting for a plane at an East Coast airport. He is the executive director of the CNC where Ward works. Ostendorf, A United Church of Christ minister, once led PrairieFire Rural Action, a group that tried to save family farms during a major agricultural economic crisis in the 1980s. “Back then we helped build a popular economic political movement among fam…
Read More…Christianity. Once, during a film about Hinduism, I watched as he leaned close to his open Bible and began kissing it, beginning at the left-hand side of the page all the way to right-hand edge. Imagine my surprise when this same, Bible-snogging student gave a very fair and balanced presentation on Islam as his final project. (A teaching success story, if ever there was one!) The Vietnam vet would also surprise me as the semester unfolded. I expe…
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…ghlighted the irony of a childless man scolding those without children. My phone went wild with calls from animal lovers, queer friends and childless Catholic couples as well. An estimated 1.1 billion people belong to the Roman Catholic church. But even many of those who aren’t Catholic consider the pope’s words influential or have concerns about how his words can affect cultures, laws, and policies. I understood why they were dismayed. As an inte…
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…y portraying cult leaders as suicidal maniacs and cult members as helpless losers, these comedies reinforced a distinction between healthy, “normal” religion and deviant “cult” religion. Basically, these jokes relieve our anxiety that our own religious beliefs and practices might be just as strange as than those of the cult. But satire can just as easily call these distinctions into question. In 1998 The Simpsons aired an episode about cults in wh…
Read More…elationships within Bryan’s family as they tried to come to terms with the loss of son, husband, and father. But the story became public. And now, advocacy groups are mobilizing around Bryan’s story to demand that LDS Church leaders do more for gay Church members. Within gay Mormon communities, there is debate over whether focusing on gay suicides actually works to change Mormon hearts and minds. But in the wake of Bryan’s death, many Mormons—LGBT…
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