Religion Dispatches
…son of God,” or “Jesus died for our sins.” Even people who wouldn’t for a minute think of themselves as uninformed biblical literalists interpret these statements with an uncontextualized, theological flatness that would move you right to the top of the class at Liberty University. This widespread ignorance among Christians—perhaps especially those who think of themselves as more progressive in their beliefs and practices—encourages cooptation by…
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…ng Obama’s commitment to its version of being “pro-Israel.” The RJC’s nine-minute web video, “Perilous Times,” ominously declares, “things have changed” in the US relationship with Israel “since Barack Obama became president.” But even the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman told Stone that quotes used in “Perilous Times” were “skewed, selective, and frequently out of context.” Indeed if one watched the video (part of the RJC’s “my buyer’s remorse…
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…ches.” Well, yes and no. It’s a party that gives Elizabeth Warren a microphone even as it dispatches Rahm Emanuel to make nice with the very same fat cats Warren denounces; that lurches to proclaim Jerusalem the one and only capital of Israel even when it knows how catastrophically wrongheaded this is to the cause of justice and peace in the Middle East; that is quite obviously afraid to talk candidly about grinding poverty in America for fear o…
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…he country were seeing 24/7 vigils. One of RRWC’s protesters stopped for a minute and began reading from the forty prayers Kromenaker and her staff had put in the windows—one for each day of the anti-abortion campaign: Day 1: Today we pray for women for whom pregnancy is not good news, that they know they have choices. Day 19: Today we pray for all pregnant women. May they be surrounded by loving voices. Day 30: Today we pray for women to throw aw…
Read More…an the Quran.” This quote is simply a re-working of Thomas Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Education, in which he says “I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” It’s amazing how imperialism and racism are so closely intertwined and persistent, and always under a veneer of civilization. I know Harris thinks he is being original and provocati…
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…re collapsing in the arms of his arresting officers.With a bouquet of microphones in his face as he sat on the ground, he rallied to ask, “Why are you arresting a priest for trying to stop the killing of a baby?” A tearful Rick Scarborough asked God to protect Weslin in jail, and the video went viral. Violence by Another Name Weslin’s lifetime example of “nonviolent” protest, the Thomas More statement read, was now being used by the United States…
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…ay—was seen as an unnatural marriage between different species. Oh, wait a minute, I forgot the most laughable part of this whole ludicrous spectacle: that it’s a Mormon, Mitt Romney, who’s insisting that marriage has “always” been between one man and one woman. Right—except that Romney’s own great-grandfather had five wives, before the LDS church, under massive pressure and persecution, reversed its doctrine on polygamy. So, let’s see if I can to…
Read More…r—along with two conservative clergypeople whom I do not know. As the five-minute piece wound down, I was about to conclude, “OK, good job,” when Hagerty ended it with this zinger: Of course, conservatives say that the best blueprint for God’s kingdom on Earth does not spring from what you read between the lines of the Bible, but what you read in black and white. At this I spilled my coffee on a perfectly good shirt. Rev. Hagler had just pointed t…
Read More…the crowd. President Obama was absent from the convention except for a two-minute video speech before Biden’s talk. The vice president, however, was the right choice to follow up the staid and stiff Mitt Romney. While Romney didn’t seem to understand that the countless organ riffs were trying to get him to wrap it up, Biden reveled in his connection to the crowd. Unlike Romney, Biden was not an outsider to African-American life. Giving shout-outs…
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…ysteries of these creatures. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. A large number of the “spiritual but not religious” crowd in the West are self-proclaimed ecologists or naturalists. A large number of atheists and agnostics are deeply passionate about ecological ethics, or how we might be more “in tune” with nature. Culturally, they become fascinated in the personalities of cats and cat videos, the companionship of dogs who offer a kind of faithf…
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