Religion Dispatches
…ttle-discussed provision of the ACA, hospitals that serve disproportionate numbers of the urban poor are losing their subsidies. But for Obama not to stand his ground and say that the cheap, low-level policies that many healthy people now have should be cancelled for the sake of the common good: that’s just inexcusable. On the other hand, he’s not getting a lot of help from his Democratic “friends” on this one, and for the same reason: They likewi…
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…have been kept down at the very bottom in order for the American System of cheap labor to function. Although Henry Clay opposed slavery in theory, the need for this ongoing subjugation was most certainly in the mind of The Great Compromiser who coined the term “American System” during the expansionist years of ‘Indian removal’ and a related Second Middle Passage that took over one million people in shackles from the Chesapeake to the rich bottomla…
Read More…tween the bunnies-and-eggs version of Easter, and the church-service version. Merchandisers are wise to define Easter by marshmallow chicks and colorful baskets, rather than bring theology into it. But there are always exceptions. One is the Oriental Trading Company. Founded to create cheap plastic toys for carnivals, OTC is now a leading supplier of cheap plastic stuff for church groups and Christian schools. Their party supply catalog always con…
Read More…hey don’t have it as bad as gays in ISIS-held territory. So let’s put that cheap argument to bed. At Patheos, Benjamin Corey shakes that cheap argument awake: Can we stop complaining about this bogus idea that American Christians are persecuted now? I mean, really. Can we stop? The world needs us to turn from ourselves and focus on this real persecution, because it’s evil and must be exposed and stopped. However, our own self-centeredness as Ameri…
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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…peoples who still live on the land that he called “swampy,” “virgin,” and “cheap.” In reality, Mennonites settled on the long inhabited territory of Treaty 1 and Treaty 5. As two scholars of religion and who avidly follow the news, and whose Mennonite ancestors also settled in the territories of Treaties 1 & 5, we were angered but not entirely surprised by this news cycle juxtaposition, in which the ongoing violence of settler colonialism was blit…
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…cause of “healing.” That is, Confederate monuments stood as trophies of a cheap reconciliation where white people of “both sides” of the war could celebrate each other’s mutual valor. Perhaps they would never agree on who was in the wrong, but for the good of the nation, (white) Americans should put their feelings of ill-will behind them. This act of “reunion” was often symbolically performed by veterans meeting on a battlefield and shaking hands…
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…r more sophisticated understandings of how religion operates, sometimes in places and ways that are not always easily recognizable as “religious.” I wrote that the New Religion Journalism is a genre where faith is “interrogated against a backdrop of wider issues, where authors frequently insert themselves into the story in a manner in which more traditional ‘God beat’ reporters wouldn’t, and most importantly, where the theism/atheism binary is que…
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…rupter, not an excuser, of bloody violence, “for blood pollutes the land” (Numbers 35:33). In early Christendom, the designation of churches as places of sanctuary was enshrined in Roman law, and the practice of religious sanctuary continued through the Middle Ages. Even after it fell out of the statute books in many places, the idea of the sacred space as one exempt from violence, including the violence of arrest and imprisonment, persists. Micha…
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…s from it so I could go there every day. It was in Jerusalem that I got my best satiation for sacred places, because there are so many from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all in one place; set apart from the rest of Israel by the prohibition of motor vehicles. I entered the dome of the rock and Masjid al-Aqsa through a darkened stairwell. I climbed over a hundred steps before I came up to the light of day, and then, there it was the golden splen…
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