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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…ven from the Druids. It doesn’t really matter—the ancient mysteries have always served the same purpose in the Masons’ cherished myth that modern science and human ingenuity will recover the lost wisdom of the ancients. In this way, the future will unite with the distant past; the very beginning and the very end of history will link together in a timeless circle. In this scheme, the Middle Ages are necessarily the low point of history, which the a…
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…that Democrats need to get better at telling stories than at crunching the numbers, in this battle of the budget, the numbers actually matter. Hell, it’s a fight about numbers. And balance. And the virtue of justice. What this latest budget battle, and the question of raising the debt ceiling, and the straw polls are revealing, is just how Tertullian a wing of the Republican Party has become. It not only offers absurd arguments with a straight fac…
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…called out black churches as detached from the crisis. Despite the rising number of African Americans with AIDS, black congregations offered little comfort and even less outreach to the afflicted, according to press reports. Black churches were slow to respond, reporters noted, because most believed that homosexuality was a sin. Yet were black congregations any more homophobic than white churches with similar theology? If Jerry Falwell became the…
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…” and ask, “how can it possibly be true that Israel is not at fault in any way?” Crossing the Non-Zionist Rubicon Criticizing Israeli government policy has long been a third rail in American Judaism, even as J Street has made such criticism a little less taboo (provided it’s done from a Zionist perspective). Yet there is a third rail so highly charged it can set off even self-described doves and progressive Zionists: questioning Zionism as central…
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…more importantly for the life lessons. His beloved wife Nellie had passed away in 1985 after 53 years of marriage, and my wife had died suddenly in 1992. Coach gave me a powerful model for dealing with that loss, a reminder that those we loved were always in our lives. On the 21st of each month (Nellie had passed on March 21), Coach would write a letter to Nellie, adding it to the neat pile on her side of the bed. During my development as a teache…
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…t 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 become dry land. “You see?—the peop…
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…r vigil. This past year we had just one rabid protester. We’ve come a long way.” Loyd, a soft-spoken Vietnam vet who grew up in a rural area near Conway, credits the peace that the couple currently enjoys to their willingness to confront their would-be oppressors head on. “The night before our first parade someone dumped six tons of manure in front of the house,” he says. “But we found out who did it and we saw to it that they did time in jail. We…
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…mpaigns in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington. In 2005, they printed 800,000 postcards in Canada “in a campaign that [argued] that the redefinition of marriage to include gay and lesbian couples would promote pedophilia, pornography and unsafe sex.” As Marianne Duddy-Burke of the LGBTQ Catholic organization Dignity USA commented in a press release, “The Knights are deeply invested in advancing a particular brand of Catholicism, and I am con…
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…ven when the road was near a river. Kedarnath saw the building of new cell phone towers, a railway reservation office, helicopter landing pads, lodges with hot water available in the room. Prices soared. When a wave of water and rock crashed down upon Kedarnath last month it crashed down upon a site bursting at the seams—had this event happened twenty years ago deaths and destruction would have been far, far less. This disaster feels to me like th…
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