Religion Dispatches
…ebate but it is between the mental health establishment and a much smaller number of traditionally minded religious therapists. However, even if Spiegel had correctly identified the nature and participants in the debate, she still would not have gotten it quite right. To his credit, Schumacher-Matos does a better job when he reviews material given to him by Spiegel and her editor Anne Gudenkauf. Among other things, Schumacher-Matos read an article…
Read More
…ciety, among the most physically intimate, and likely include the greatest number of vulnerable people. Even single members of large congregations can have a dramatic effect on how coronavirus spreads or doesn’t, as South Korea found out the hard way. While many aren’t meeting at all or are streaming services, some churches that do meet feel like they need to support those who need it, in worship or otherwise. My mother’s congregation in Madison,…
Read More
…his Papacy legacy is in tatters historically, unless he can pull off an amazing change of heart, and language. At 83 years of age, that is hard to do. At the very least he should certainly heed the calls for an emergency synod to deal with the scope of the scandal. For all of his “doctrinal purity,” he very well may be in charge of the destruction of the moral and temporal authority of the Roman Catholic Church as he knows it. The Pope’s dogmatic…
Read More
…le. …. And we are fighting our brave troops and combatants who are now in Gaza … this chain of Jewish heroes, a chain that… started 3,000 years ago.” Two days later he added: “We will not realize the promise of a better future unless we, the civilized world, are willing to fight the barbarians … The Bible says that there is a time for peace and a time for war. … Today, we draw a line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism……
Read More
…infringes on that comfort. By the end of this study, I was shocked at the number of educated people I met who dismissed my work as a book on “freaks.” Ideally, I would like readers who dismiss this community to stop laughing, and readers who fear this community to perhaps smile. What alternative title would you give the book? So many books have been written about vampires that almost every clever title has been taken. Our Vampires, Ourselves was…
Read More
…sus Christ” will get to heaven. (I’m not alone here, by the way; a growing number of evangelical Christians agree with me.) At the same time, the most moving and culturally important visions of heaven are those created by the conservative believers. These are the visions that move people to action: to be faithful to One God, for example, or to martyr themselves. I would like to believe in heaven as a concrete reality in the future, a place that re…
Read More
…hment from God for Satanism—the same episode that Chrissy Stroop ranked as number one on her own top 10 list, and a worthy contender, no doubt! But since Robertson liked to say outrageous things like this on a regular basis, I created a list more attuned to underlying structural aspects of his resume: less about preposterous provocations and more about his work as a cog in the everyday banality of evil in the Republican coalition. It’s interesting…
Read More
…nine on the Richter scale. It devastated the population. Estimates of the number of people killed range from 10,000 to 100,000. At the time the quake struck, worshipers filled the churches honoring their dead. The churches, the worshippers, and the city around them were effectively destroyed. Not long after the major quake hit, a tsunami followed that killed those who had rushed to the beaches in fear to avoid the havoc of the earthquake. The cat…
Read More
…out? Anything to make a social impact?” I had been on the Daily Show for a number of years at this point, and spoken to a lot of Islamophobes, people who had a lot of misinformation about Islam and Muslims. It was a personal thing to me, and it was an issue I thought I could lend my voice to in a satirical space. Were there any particular misconceptions or fears you wanted to address? There was a lot of stuff about Shari’ah Law, the protests again…
Read More
…more effective if it were honest. And perhaps that would have lessened the number of death threats and other vile correspondences she has received. Second, others have said that she deserved the criticism for its political harm, that this hurts the Democratic party. Perhaps, but that doesn’t make much sense either, because the manufactured outrage made it worse. If a Democratic leader had privately contacted her and said, “Ilhan, you have to clari…
Read More