Religion Dispatches
…e explicit in their concern for structural justice and the failings of the free market system. Famously, Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium denounces those who “continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world” as expressing a “crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding eco…
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…absorbing themselves in dreams of another life elsewhere. They’re kids in buses longing to be free. When older, they come back, think of all those wasted hours, and wonder if there can be an escape from the sprawl in the wilderness downtown, or anyplace else. All my old friends/they don’t know me now, seems the only certain conclusion. And the band invites you to experience the feelings of the songs in a multimedia environment. At this site, you c…
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…New Money System 666 (1982), popularized the idea that the Uniform Product Codes (i.e. UPCs or barcodes) were the mark of the beast and would one day be tattooed on human bodies. A trend of ironic barcode tattoos popular in the early twentieth century nods to this idea while commenting on western consumerism. Microchip technology has since replaced the UPC as the most likely candidate for the introduction of a cashless society and thus the mark of…
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…the big, evil banks, and that the good-guy local banks were successful because they were free from government regulation. This depiction matches his thesis about today’s economic problems: that too much government intervention in the form of bank bailouts is the inherent evil—as opposed to the absence of regulation that led to the banks’ implosion at the hands of, well, you know, greedy bigwigs. To Beck, the bank bailouts are evidence of socialism…
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…uggest. The Talmud doesn’t include those other voices, not necessarily because they thought they were heretics, but because they weren’t part of the club and thus their views had little if any authority. If all we had was the Babylonian Talmud we’d know very little about Babylonian Jewry in this period. All we’d have is the record of a thin slice of the society in a small number of academies. Today, Talmudic scholars are exploring the wider vistas…
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…troubles of the world. And here is where a theological reading provides a useful counterpoint. There’s a difference between hope and optimism: hope can be maintained even when optimism can’t, because in theological terms hope is funded by the promises God has made to the world and not by human ingenuity. Christians are asked, in this reading, to immerse themselves in the world’s suffering rather than to look away from it. A Christian eschatology…
Read More…United States Capitol with his band of fear-stoking propagandists. Gaffney is right. The Constitution is under attack. The panic that the Constitution is so weak that it would collapse under the weight of a few contracts providing for alternative dispute resolution, or wither from upholding the Free Exercise clause for Muslims or conducting criminal trials in accordance with it, has actually caused a mortal threat to the Constitution and the free…
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…ument made by conservatives in the U.S. who dislike the current GOP but refuse to support Democrats: Presented with a choice between “the Left” and even the far-right, they see “the Left” as the bigger existential threat—and will stick with the Right despite expressions of bigotry, violations of the law, anti-democratic behavior, and more. Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews, was not convinced, though his predecessor and presi…
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…e Civil Rights Act of 1964 are subject to heightened judicial scrutiny because they may constitute an undue imposition on freedom of expression. Anthony Kreis, an attorney and visiting assistant professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law who specializes in “religious freedom” and civil rights, told RD that the DOJ’s brief is par for the course of an administration that started its tenure by rescinding Title IX protections for transgender students, t…
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…alogue to end these unjust laws wherever there is a Christian presence because ‘Until we are all free, we are none of us free.’” Anglican Communion: Gay couple’s church wedding expected to rile Communion’s conservatives The first wedding by a same-sex couple in an Anglican Church in Britain is expected to further exacerbate tensions within the Anglican Communion. Excerpts from The Guardian’s Cathering Pepinster reporting: The first gay Anglican we…
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