Religion Dispatches
…betrays both their Judeo as well as their Christian roots. Writing in her latest book, The Case for God, Karen Armstrong notes that in Jewish tradition, “rabbis regarded hatred of any human being made in God’s image as tantamount to atheism, so murder was not just a crime against humanity but a sacrilege: ‘Scripture instructs us that whatsoever sheds human blood is regarded as if he had diminished the divine image.’ […] To humiliate anybody, even…
Read More…I will strive to not let my own personal connections cloud my take on his latest work — A Manifesto! — in which Bishop Spong quite eloquently spells out why he’s done arguing over whether or not gays and lesbians should be fully welcomed within not just the church but society. He writes: The battle is over. The victory has been won. There is no reasonable doubt as to what the final outcome of this struggle will be. Homosexual people will be accep…
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…children’s literature? Bubbling up under the surface of The Magicians (the latest novel from Time magazine book critic Lev Grossman) is the stuff of these same sincere elements—the kind many readers relish when looking to escape with a good book. On first glance, he offers us not only a world filled with magic, but a school for young magicians, the adventures of aspiring young sorcerers, magical creatures and spells, fantastic landscapes galore, a…
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…int that the New Atheism crosses the line and undermines its own effort to promote critical thinking. The problem with an exclusively negative approach to religion is twofold. First, while it helps sell books, it risks promoting intolerance and potentially even hatred of religious people. Atheists will point out that they do not fly planes into buildings or murder doctors, as some religious fundamentalists have done. However, it takes one visit to…
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…ist plots involving anti-matter bombs, there’s little reason to expect his latest work to be factually reliable. Perhaps it shouldn’t need to be, except for Brown’s prefatory note claiming that “all organizations in this novel exist,” and “all rituals, science, artwork, and monuments in this novel are real.” As a student of Freemasonry, I can vouch that Brown’s claim is generally true. The strange rituals and traditions that the novel attributes t…
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…If you think this is a script from a porn movie, think again: this is the latest escapade from the Archdiocese of Miami, encapsulated in the headline from the Miami Herald “Ex-Stripper: Priest is my baby’s father—and I want him to pay.” Before I go south and start to write this whole piece with quotes from songs (“That’s Just My Baby Daddy” comes to mind) I am struck with disgust about where the Catholic church, and lately Miami’s Archdiocese in…
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…onk Thich Nhat Hanh, and the Dalai Lama (who has publicly appealed to the Myanmar government to show “magnanimity and understanding” to “a fellow Buddhist.” Meanwhile, in the wake of the latest trouble—and as lawyers, politicians, and religious leaders fight for her release—a new barbed wire fence has been installed around her home….
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…on’t understand why such women don’t understand that the same men who will promote them over their progressive sisters can just as easily promote others over them. It is the power dynamic, not just the people, that is at issue here. Postmodern Catholicism is a different animal than its pre-Vatican II cousin. Catholics (women and men, lay and clerical, secular and religious) think for themselves, forming new syntheses of faith and solidarity. Nuns,…
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…for many fundamentalist and conservative evangelicals may well be just the latest, most visible evidence that Obama is antichrist. For others, as Frank Schaeffer suggested in another recent piece, opposing health care reform participates in a generations-long effort among evangelicals to aggrandize political power to themselves by obstructing democracy. More broadly, these examples of religious extremism exist on a continuum of disturbing response…
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…nce?); The Matrix Trilogy, as Adam Gopnik has pointed out, is probably the latest version of this story—a hero freeing human beings from their roles as organic batteries cultivated to power a race of evil machines. There is a more frightening proposition: that other people are in fact shadows cast on the wall. How do we know others are not a dream? Even observable behavior is a poor indicator. Take the fact of Kismet, a robot engineered at MIT to…
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