Religion Dispatches
…those of us whose lifestyles are dependent upon a ‘religious’ devotion to cheap oil. The deepest irony of all is that BP, along with the other oil companies, has come to function as a god. The truth, buried beneath all the oil and punditry, is that our devotion to this false god has led to the suffering of innocents, in the oceans and beaches, in the marshes and ecosystems, and in our communities. We have been slow, too slow by far, to realize th…
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…sle. Nevertheless, his ambition outstretches any run-of-the-mill author of cheap thrillers. For better or worse, after two runaway bestsellers that claim to upend the traditional story of Christianity, he has become America’s most important pop philosopher and historian. In the earlier books, he hatched a version of the faith that spoke to many people in ways that churches no longer seem able to. Now, by turning to Freemasonry in The Lost Symbol,…
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…billions. “This enemy is better networked than we are,” lamented General John Abizaid at a 2007 conference in Virginia Beach. Bousquet also quotes the 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed boasting, “I know that the materialistic Western mind cannot grasp… how this works.” Such savvy, so removed from MIT or the complexity theorists at the Santa Fe Institute, runs in tension with Bousquet’s master narrative that links scientific war-making with elit…
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…
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…ry process of truth-telling and the material righting of wrongs. Rather, a cheap reconciliation was rendered, which served—at the beginning of Jim Crow, no less—to hide our continued animosities from ourselves, rejecting one of the major opportunities this nation has had to face what Eddie Glaude, following James Baldwin, calls “the lie.” It is now relatively well-known that most Confederate monuments were constructed at the height of lynching and…
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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…
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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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…o the water, up to his nose, about to drown?” “What’s a midrash?” said I. “Oho!” said he, and even over the phone I could feel the excitement rise. “The rabbis would take the ancient text, and read it in new ways. On this one, where the Torah says the people ‘went into the sea on the dry land,’ the rabbis ask, ‘Which was it? How could it be both sea and dry land?’ And they answer that one of them went in while it was still sea; only then did it be…
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…Conference of Presidents, AIPAC people, people on the right,” said Rabbi John Rosove, of Temple Israel of Hollywood, a Reform congregation in Los Angeles, and co-chair of the J Street Rabbinic Cabinet. “They need to grow up. Jews argue. We need civil discourse.” “It’s not healthy,” said Kleinbaum, “that the Jewish community has created litmus tests for what’s okay and not okay to talk about.” The mainstream Jewish community, she added, “has broug…
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…tal volunteers—who would come in to teach job skills and do Bible study—outnumbered Catholic volunteers by about 15 to 1. Also in the city I was in the vast majority of inmates were from the poorer parts, where there are more Pentecostals. But the main reason for the dominance of Pentecostalism was because they believe in the potential for God to radically change a person’s life. The once-I-was-lost-but-now-I’m-found narrative in Pentecostalism re…
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