Religion Dispatches
…m of torture Lord, in good conscience condone treating human beings in the way Jesus died so that humans would never have to die in such a way? You approved of and condoned as unregulated a free-market as possible and have watched as our nation falls into economic collapse. You encouraged excessive greed and now millions are paying the price when it proved unsustainable. Millionaires and billionaires padded their pockets with money they had no use…
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…been the targets of extremism. It’s been extremely helpful. I knew right away to take this very seriously. I knew right away to document every message that came in. I knew right away to contact both our local law enforcement as well as federal law enforcement in the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. I’ve learned a lot from this experience, and our work to help prepare other congregations will be much stronger because of it. Can you tel…
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…ccept a world in which they have to coexist with people who don’t love the way they do, don’t identify themselves the way they do, and don’t relate to social conditioning the way they do. So no, this violence won’t end until it is stopped, because the pundits and politicians and trolls pushing this rhetoric want more violence. They’re already calling for the next mass shooting, the way they’d been calling for more bombings and more threats and mor…
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…n you raise these kinds of questions, people light up. This recognizes the way in which religion is present in everyday life. It not only does something really good for the animals by supporting a movement towards more humane farming, but it empowers people to live their values and in a most community-building way. Because nothing is more community-building than breaking bread together. Also on the Cubit: The Religious Roots of American Environmen…
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…we try to tell ourselves. “There must be something terribly wrong with the way this story is being told, even if it is the Israeli army itself that is telling it.” After a while, though, the evidence accumulates, and it becomes harder and harder to discard it or wish it away. The anguished testimony of the Israeli soldiers collected by Breaking the Silence makes a mockery of willful denial. Breaking the Silence is an explicitly nonpolitical organi…
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…s burned their magic scrolls that they had used before they converted as a way of declaring their new identity. In the twentieth century, Hindu extremists have burned books by Western scholars as a way of protesting Western academic analysis of Hindu symbols. The Mouse that Roared? So Pastor Jones is in excellent historical company. Despite his proudly-displayed ignorance of the contents of the Qur’an (an all-too-frequent trait of book burners), h…
Read More…ing religion to argue against lifting DADT doesn’t make sense to Nicholson. “People disguise prejudice and personal dislikes in the guise of religion all the time and I think this is just another example of people grasping for straws to figure out any possible way to oppose this inevitable change. DADT has nothing to do with religion or religious freedom or religious speech. An objective person can spot what a stretch it is to tie religion into an…
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…serving as proof that a biological body can become immortal. For my part, they just slow me way down, they shift my attention. But, in each case, this jellyfish temporality serves as a kind of interference. Watching them can change the way we think, the way we feel. Meditating on a jellyfish, I’m suggesting, can elicit a kind of transformation. You may not find them included on a list of “religious things,” but perhaps that has more to do with our…
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…an be seen as both Hindu and Muslim. Musically, they function in a similar way to qawwals in northwestern India and in Pakistan. Their music draws on Indic and Islamicate sources. Parvathy Baul was the first female Baul I had seen in public, and her music demonstrated the ways that cultures combine to create new forms. The song in the clip below ends with an invocation of figures normally associated with the qawwali tradition, showing how the Baul…
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…es to mind). But while a specific formulation of theism might have to give way before scientific evidence in just the way that a specific version of Darwinian theory might need to give way to a more nuanced and comprehensive version, the overall theological project—to shape a theistic worldview consistent with experience—remains viable regardless of what science teaches us. What this means is that in a broad sense a theistic worldview is empirical…
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