Religion Dispatches
…r me, except I admit, at the very last second when I was facing out of the plane, 40,000 feet above the ground. But then I had no time to think, the jump was on. It was fabulous! I used to tell people that in my next life I want to be a bird. In this life I do everything I can to practice. So I’ve been sky diving, parasailing, and now faux flying in a wind tunnel. It’s true I love the air; I love rides in the amusement park that let me soar throug…
Read More…threatens to be overshadowed by his comments on gay priests uttered on the plane to Rome, it has generated an enormous outpouring of emotion and fervor. From the time that he stepped out of the plane, he has been mobbed by throngs of excited followers, straining to see and touch him. Francis has relished the opportunity to get close to the people which, among other things, has given his security detail veritable nightmares. What accounts for this…
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…s, he was “turned around.” More complexly, “my being was rotated through a plane I could not now point to” into an azure hyperfield laced with shimmering, lattice-like information grids. Morrison had been “twisted off the surface of the universe into the fifth dimension,” into eternity, into infinity. The revelations followed fast and furious. One involved his realization that all of life on this floating planet is a “single weird anemone-like meg…
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…eetering—superpower. If we want to be in the driver’s seat of a globalized planet, we must know where the road is. Saving the World from the United States Last week, Sarah Palin, a woman who has scarcely left the confines of this country, has shared the headlines with our president, the Kansan-Kenyan-black-white-Hawaiian-Indonesian-American, who has just returned from a whirlwind tour of Asia. Sarah Palin and Obama may or may not face off in 2012,…
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…m in which Denzel Washington plays a pilot who miraculously lands a broken plane while drunk and high—opens with a scene of a naked woman smoking a joint. But even amid the sex and drugs, this film makes perfect sense as the latest installment of an acting career birthed in Pentecostal spirit. Ever since a woman with the “gift of prophecy” signaled a young Denzel out for future preaching prowess, he has been serious about his spiritual contributio…
Read MoreThis weekend a plane flew over Coney Island and the Rockaways towing a banner with a swastika and an ad for proswastika.org, a new initiative by the Raelians—a religious movement that believes humans were created by ancient extra-terrestrials, and whose insignia is a swastika inside of a hexagram. According to Raelian spokesperson Thomas Kaenzig, the swastika was brought to Earth millions of years ago by our alien forefathers, which is presumably…
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…aced Jackelen at the passing of the peace. This morning, when he boarded a plane back to Rome, Kristina Kappelin of Swedish TV asked the pope if the Catholic ban on female priests was “forever.” “On the ordination of women in the Catholic church,” the pope replied, “the last word is clear.” Referring to John Paul II’s 1994 apostolic letter banning women from ordination, Francis told Kappelin that if the letter is “carefully read, it goes in that d…
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…” “On 17th of June in the morning,” she concluded, “bombing was heavy, two planes, two MIGs and helicopters were bombing Kadugli. I looked at my kids and told them that we have to leave. We relied on God and left. Our travels were long and it took four days to get a plane to be able to leave the region. If we had waited just one day, we wouldn’t have made it out of there alive.” Afterward, the UN’s press office took the unusual step of issuing a p…
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…Dr. King and his relevance to this moment, God called me home. I got on a plane and flew back in time. When I arrived on Thursday, August 14, 2014, West Florissant was an occupied territory. It looked and felt like Watts, Birmingham and Palestine all at once, and I did not see you. Your absence made my presence suspicious. A clergy collar has come to signify cowardice—a scarlet letter deserving rebuke. Expletive after expletive was hurled not onl…
Read More…credit: the man has balls to say this. Yes, fracking gives Americans more cheap carbon energy—for a while. And then we’re left with ruined landscapes, ruined aquifers, and our same old dependence on foreign energy sources, having failed to turn to renewables while mindlessly pumping more cheap petroleum into our veins. Like other critics of the new encyclical, Brooks chalks up the pope’s hostility to capitalism as the product of naivete or perhap…
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