Religion Dispatches
…democracy—a principled stand is sometimes a partisan stand.) Following the latest in the Egyptian military’s unprovoked assaults on civilian protesters, who reasonably enough are furious with the cancellation of their vote, the same kinds of conflations continue to be made. It’s as if we cannot bring ourselves to believe that people who wear suits and ties, go to beaches for vacation, put religion on the backburner, and otherwise say and do the “r…
Read More…plode, in the manner of black holes, drawing in all those around them. The latest rumors indicate the children of senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders, as well as several journalists, have been killed; it is practically impossible to imagine any meaningful reconciliation now. Where before the demand was reinstating Morsi, what possible demands could there be at this point? And what expectation of their fulfillment? When I wrote more than two years ag…
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…Textiles at the Nevada State Museum, advised Burners looking to sport the latest trend: “boots are in; wings, stilts, crinolines, and ballet tutus are in; nudity and body paint are in; utili kilts are popular, as is wearing underwear as outerwear.” At Burning Man, bodies become works of art alongside giant sculptures and temples adorned with repurposed objects. All of these visual cues work together to signal to Burners that they have entered a r…
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…e-level membership. Which is about as interesting to me as Kate Gosselin’s latest makeover. But the b-o-r-i-n-g world of Kody Brown and family may in fact be a tremendous blessing to the broader community of 40,000 plus Mormon fundamentalist polygamists, most of whom have been struggling to get out from under PR havoc wreaked by the exploits of monomaniacal FLDS leader Warren Jeffs and his now infamous exploits in underage arranged marriage and wa…
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…those he believed were Islamist terrorist sympathizers. In many ways, this latest act of religious hatred, carried out in the name of cultural purity, signals the febrile acceptance of Osama bin Laden’s invitation to reignite the medieval holy war between Islam and the Christian West. While the violence is similar, any similarity is tactical, not substantive. The instances Breivik approvingly cites (say, the war in Bosnia) pre-date al Qaeda’s prom…
Read More…_ At the beginning of “The Time of Angels,” the first half of Doctor Who’s latest two-parter, the Doctor and Amy have found themselves in the 51st century, assisting a military mission to recover a crashed ship’s cargo. We meet a military commander who identifies himself as “Father Octavian—Bishop Second Class, 20 clerics at my command.” Clearly there is some interesting church history in the thirty centuries between that future and our present, b…
Read More…In the latest installment of RD’s collaboration with bloggingheads.tv, associate editor Hussein Rashid talks with Rabbi and RD contributor Benjamin Weiner about whether Muslims and Jews worship the same God, about monotheism, and about the poverty of the American religious vocabulary. Watch it here:…
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…lling one person. The monthly average for June is half that. It’s only the latest in a series of flash floods. In Tennessee, 18 people died. In Arkansas, 20 were killed. The waitresses looked teary-eyed at the customers, as if they were simply unable to bear any more bad news. We stared back at the women with the same expression. What the hell has been unleashed? Of course, you don’t have to be washed in the blood of salvation to know that somethi…
Read More…bama’s vaunted Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships? In the latest installment of RD’s collaboration with bloggingheads.tv, associate editor Sarah Posner talks religion and politics with Get Religion’s Mollie Ziegler Hemingway. They don’t exactly agree on the politics of the Democrats’ efforts to reach “people of faith,” and they definitely don’t agree on the question of whether LGBT rights should yield to religious conscience right…
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The results of an online survey published in the latest issue of Skeptic Magazine show that atheists in America fear paying a high social price in coming out as a non-believer. “The Stigma of Being an Atheist: An Empirical Study on the New Atheist Movement and its Consequences,” written by Tom Arcaro, was based on the results of 8,200 people who identify as atheists or non-believers in God. The survey, “Coming Out as an Atheist,” was posted live…
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