Religion Dispatches
…nd more, serious business is being done through Twitter, a Web site with a most unserious-sounding name. On Twitter, you tweet out a tweet, which everyone who is following your tweets can see. True to the name and its accompanying noun/verb, the site’s architecture seemingly confines it to the trivial. Every tweet must be under 140 characters (which this paragraph has already long exceeded). Even its built-in instructions emphasize triviality—“wha…
Read More…just about wiped out my little savings, which I ended up using to pay for most of her funeral expenses. Then I learned she had made me the beneficiary on two life insurance policies. Sometimes when you have limited financial means you may dream of inheriting some money—but let me tell you, it is an awful, awful thing to inherit money from the death of some one you love. There is no amount of money that alleviates the pain of losing my sister. So,…
Read More…e coming to the US for work get villainized. “Illegal alien” is one of the most unbelievably pejorative terms you can apply to anyone. Your experience seems to reflect something I’ve found in Mormon politics: there is a contradiction between incredible concern Mormons show for the individual and yet a reticence or even a resistance to thinking about the systematic problems and injustices the put individuals in impossible and even harmful situatio…
Read More
…ly to be compensated under the system of “Relative Value Units” by which almo*]}*st all physicians are now paid: There is a compassionate, altruistic core of medical practice—sitting with a grieving family after a loved one is lost; lending your experience to a younger colleague struggling to manage a complex case; telephoning a patient and listening to how she is faring after surgery and chemotherapy for her breast cancer; extending yourself beyond t…
Read More
…ttempting to get arrested under the new hate crimes law for preaching against homosexuality. (They were not arrested; contrary to their claims, the law protects speech.) “There was homophobia to feed on, and the circumstances were so right to try to activate and intensify the homophobia,” said Kaggwa. A year after Lively’s conference, Lou Engle and his revival, The Call, extended further support to the bill. Kaggwa is dismayed by the spread of hom…
Read More
…ve in Both Bigfoot and the Bible?” Apparently CNN’s people—its authors and most of the people who have commented on its article thus far—have not been not been channel-surfing enough. At least not in Tennessee. Just two weeks ago, on October 1, 2010, Hal Lindsey (author of the grand-daddy of all Left Behind books, The Late Great Planet Earth), devoted his television show to this very question: “Are UFOs Real?” If you missed the show, here it is on…
Read More
…cho powerfully here: “Blackness and criminality are merged in the minds of most white Americans.” In forcing these uncomfortable questions on us, Professor Butler is saying that we must reckon with the legal, social, historical, and finally the religious, entanglements of Christianity with whiteness. So entwined has the racial imagination, the imaginary of whiteness, become with Christianity in the religious underwriting of U.S. society that the q…
Read More
…probably because it’s more potent.) And yet, when faced with the choice, I most often buy what’s natural. The expensive stuff comes from a plant. It’s real. “It’s probably better for me and for the world,” I think, without a modicum of supporting evidence. “There’s a picture of a flower right there on the package.” The allure of naturalness isn’t limited to the grocery store. From diet and medicine to childbirth and economics, we assume that natur…
Read More…he streets. Targeting the gay community, activists say, appeals to Egypt’s mostly conservative population; both Muslims and Christians consider homosexuality a sin. A 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 95 percent of Egyptians believed that homosexuality was socially unacceptable. In a separate Post story, Katy Pearce suggested that the anti-gay campaign in Azerbaijan, launched after an investigative journalism coalition released a r…
Read More
…view last week. “In the two years [since], we have succeeded in covering almo*]}*st the entire country. Even some LGBT rights supporters are a little mystified that marriage equality rulings haven’t sparked a national backlash. The fight over Mexico City’s 2009 marriage equality law brought strong opposition from the country’s Catholic hierarchy. Yet while some state bishops have condemned marriages between same-sex couples in the past few years, ther…
Read More