Religion Dispatches
…ve a common phrase, a common idea.” The church put the hashtag on their website. Pastors pushed it on social media. It appeared in New Life’s local TV commercials. People use social media. Marketers use social media. Spreading the good news is, on some level, a form of marketing. As a simultaneous marker of identity and identity marketer, the hashtag plays a neat trick: it lets you affiliate yourself with a club, and then broadcast that clubbiness…
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…ies of the war dead who now number over 4,079 easily accessible through websites and cybermemorials, online media sources and social networking pages still brimming with life, the anonymous war dead and unknown soldiers have been the bread and butter of religious nationalism in the United States. The generally anonymous military dead represented most poignantly and ceremonially at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier have been easily assimilated into t…
Read More…tic perspective he brings to the table. The socially conservative Catholic Online describes Daschle’s selection to be the next HHS Secretary as “A Pro-Life Nightmare,” warning that: “It wasn’t that many years ago that Tom Daschle was the pro-life movement’s worst congressional nightmare. Over the years, as a senator and Senate Minority Leader, he constantly supported pro-choice legislation and initiatives.” The report continued: “Describing himsel…
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…acticing Buddhists, not to mention for his millions of spiritually-curious online followers? But his atheistic-toned words should not come as a surprise. Back in June, he tweeted that he is “increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether.” Slowly, HHDL’s social media team has been tweaking the guru’s image to better align with our more secular views. Westerners are d…
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…ing to what Michelle Kuo call “the spectral atomization of disinformation” online. The power of Bannon’s Satan resides in illusion, or in keeping his audience trapped in illusion, with no bearing on the really real, no sense of a reality outside the lies, the propaganda, the devil’s version of “truth.” This Satanic power thus depends on a lack of discernment, a loss of grounding. In such a setting, one could never “fact-check” or, to eschew the eu…
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…ch Associates in 2018, “A concurrently published article from Spectrum, an online news outlet launched in 2015 to publish objective coverage of autism research, points out there are myriad reasons why people with autism are more likely to identify as LGBTQ, including “decreased adherence to social conventions” and “greater forthrightness and honesty.” But the correlations are not important to those peddling in conspiracy theories. Dr. Michelle Cre…
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…part company with conventional reality for a moment and take up residence online, joining millions of others in a search for the sublime reality that can be only momentarily captured in a book of monsters, which is always and ever a book of miracles. The dreams we realize in movies, virtual realities, and videogames are the dreams we have always dreamed; the monsters we find there are the monsters we cherish, for it is their presence that reminds…
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…ch of the Kingdom of God in Brazil), or streaming a 24-hour worship chapel online (International House of Prayer Kansas City). In time, I think the pandemic will prove significant in changing the way people attend church. More and more, people are following pastors they find on social media who align with their particular interests and have good digital infrastructure. As for the networks, Flory and Christerson have done great work in this area. T…
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…Dome” campaign features a TV commercial reminiscent of a Batman movie; an online videogame in which fans “become John Abraham,” the ferocious and much-feared Falcons’ all-pro defensive lineman, “paralyzing their opponents with fear… bringing thousands of screaming fans to their feet… delivering that last-second game-winning sack”; and a Facebook page where fans express their devotion to the team, declaring that they “bleed Falcons red!” and urgin…
Read More…kabee/status/1010497564435730434?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F2018%2F06%2F23%2Fpolitics%2Fmike-huckabee-ms13-pelosi%2Findex.html As many on social media pointed out, this is a classic dehumanization strategy—take a blameworthy sub-group like MS-13 and conflate them with a larger group, such as migrants coming from Mexico and other parts of Central and South America. This is part of a larger degeneration of our public sph…
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