Religion Dispatches
…ater” and more egregious ad hominem comments floated from keyboards to the world of cyberspace. This is not new. We can read transcripts of battles in the US Congress in the 19th century or accusations back and forth in the Zionist Congresses in the early 20th that would make our hair stand on end. When one gets into this business, either as a professional or as a moonlighter, it comes with the territory. This is not the disease. The disease is th…
Read More…hen they were unjust, and subjected himself to them meekly. Not exactly a crusading culture warrior, then. Is truthful;—High marks here. Jesus never was a liar. “Let your word be “Yes, Yes” or “No, No”; anything more than this comes from the evil one.” Hates covetousness.—Again, Jesus does well by this measure, having a strong anti-covetousness platform. On the other hand, he does have an explicitly redistributionist economic program. No word on h…
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…formers. We might add John Milton to the list. With the “discovery” of the new world came the division of lands and the extension of European authority over the natives. The Church allowed Catholic monarchs to colonize the Americas under the guise of “evangelism.” From there we might discuss the spread of the British Empire to the Americas, the founding of the colonies, and the arrival of religious dissenters. We might mention the Declaration of I…
Read More…on reminds us in Playing in the Dark, it’s also language’s ability to construct new and better, fairer, and more beautiful worlds, so that the “ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.” God takes prophets from us when we’re most in need of them—perhaps the better to recruit new voices unto the wilderness. Morrison’s witness to language’s power to both destr…
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…ding directors of the DC-area social justice-oriented Quixote Center, such new practices were in evidence. Bill Callahan was a Jesuit priest. A feminist before most men could even spell the word, he was dismissed from the order in the 1990s for reasons including his support of women’s ordination. He declined to leave his public ministry at Quixote and return to Boston as ordered. In other words, he refused to cop to a false notion of obedience tha…
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…never question—in a serious way—the sufficiency of science as a guide to truth. Perhaps he thinks the success of science makes it a self-evident choice when it comes to grounding his worldview; what he does not and will not consider is the very real possibility that science is so successful precisely because it is so limited. To reject this possibility out-of-hand is nothing but intellectual laziness. Dawkins is dogmatically rigid and fixed in pl…
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…formation a conflict would follow Finally, in early July, things reached a breaking point. Hyrum, eager to help, invited Joseph to his office on the morning of July 12 and urged him to dictate a revelation outlining the theology of plural marriage. He hoped that just as the doctrine had permanently converted him, it could finally do the same for Emma. Joseph acquiesced and produced a 3,300-word revelation “on the order of the priesthood.” Hyrum, s…
Read More…arguing that leaving future generations with government debt would be the truly immoral thing to do. He told the Eternal Word Television Network recently, “If we keep growing government in debt, we will crowd out the civil society — those charities, those churches, those institutions in our local communities that do the most to actually have a human touch to help people in need.” (Institutions with a human touch like the Catholic school in Indiana…
Read More…ndidate Huntsman. A refreshingly sober and penetrating take comes from the New York Times’ Matt Bai, who observes that Huntsman has already encountered trouble on the campaign trail connecting with voters, leaving them “disappointed” by his “lack of any evident vision.” The perception that Huntsman lacks a clear vision is not helped along by videos launched by the campaign to introduce the candidate, nor by his washed-out looking website. Go to ca…
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…. rich black men and independent, vocal women) is not inconsistent with the Tea Party’s desire to take back our country. The important unspoken questions are: who are we and take back our country from whom? These bizarre claims based on free-association analyses of lyrics, videos, and public appearances of popular culture icons reveal fears about difference and a desire for homogeneity that is simply impossible. If individuals were to act on the r…
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