Religion Dispatches
…racticing Jewish kid from Boulder, Colorado, who describes himself as “sometimes agnostic, sometimes atheist, depending on the day,” Gazowsky’s world was as faraway a land as he could have imagined. “When I walked into that church the first time, I may as well have been stepping onto another planet,” he says. “It was like a foreign country, you know. And far stranger than some foreign countries. The way that they operate… It was just so different….
Read More…an ad in a local shop or community center. Last minute emergency? Call the airline right away to see about possibilities for accommodating your needs. Likewise, if one is ardently anti-abortion for moral reasons, rather than only focus on making it illegal, prevent it by limiting unwanted pregnancies: help ensure adequate, healthy sex education and contraception are available to those who need or want them. Work to make affordable, quality prenata…
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…underpaying workers for all their wages, denying workers legally-owed overtime pay, or cheating them in other ways. Google your favorite fast food restaurant and the words “unpaid wages” to learn about workers suits against most of them. Labor Day is a chance to reflect on the workers all around us. Unfortunately, many aren’t doing well. Record numbers are employed in jobs offering no health insurance, pension, vacation days or sick days. Million…
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…d stance” as “cheap grace,” Rev. Mark Creech of the Christian Action League attributed Bakker’s preaching of a “toxic and counterfeit gay-affirming gospel” to being injured by the church as a child. “In some ways he’s right,” Bakker told me in response. “It’s called empathy.” He continued: “Every time someone accuses me of cheap grace, I go back and say no, it’s free grace. Grace is free. The reason I understand the Bible the way I do is probably…
Read More…dear to both of us, and love one another. Do we still have skirmishes from time to time? Yes, usually around the holidays, but we try to be civil to one another. Civility seems to be a casualty of this health care debate. Members of Congress were spat on, called racial and sexual slurs, and demeaned by a group of “Tea Party” protestors before the historic vote over the weekend, prompting Majority leader Steny Hoyer to issue a statement: “On the on…
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…then it has to begin by tackling the question of land. Swampy, virgin, and cheap Canadians who tell stories about land in a public setting can no longer do so while ignoring that they (we) are treaty people—that Canadians live in nation-to-nation relations with Indigenous peoples. As treaty people, part of the responsibility of settlers is to know and tell stories that acknowledge Indigenous land is the very same territory that they also call home…
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…s of military thought today, perhaps religion served a similar function in times before. One needn’t look any further than the Psalms: “My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust… His faithfulness is a shield and buckler.” Martial imagery pervades religious writings from around the world, even if interpretation over time often renders it “just” metaphorical. Bousquet rightly warns us not to belittle metaphors; they “constitute a means of o…
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…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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…ident that it can do so right here in Quitman. Yet there were a perplexing number of Antique and Gift Shops, the sorts of thing that normally require a significant tourist industry or leisure class to support. That kind of shopping takes place on the weekends, yet all but one store on Main Street in Quitman was closed this Sunday. I was especially taken by the two largest of them, both of them going out of business. Romine’s Furniture especially c…
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…
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