Religion Dispatches
…y anti-gay and anti-abortion—was provided by a new media outfit called The Judeo-Christian View. Dr. O’Neill Dozier, the General Publisher of JCV, claims to have an initial print circulation of over 325,000 and an e-mail list of approximately 5,000,000. Dozier, a former National Football League player is the founding and current pastor of The Worldwide Christian Center, a non-denominational community church in Pompano Beach, Florida….
Read More
…ices will contribute to a healthier public square and a more vibrant, pluralistic democracy in America. Are you hoping to just inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off? If there are two groups I’m taking aim at, it’s the Christian Right that has distorted religion into a partisan agenda on the one hand and the raft of neo-atheist authors that are asserting—largely in (over)reaction to this first group—that “religion poisons everything…
Read More
…ter woman for GOP politics, or will she be returned to the frozen tundra?* —- *There has been a surprisingly vibrant discussion surrounding the potential redundancy of the phrase ‘frozen tundra.’ The New York Times’ sports pages reported on Lake Superior State University’s eagerly awaited List of “Words Banished From the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness, 2003 edition,” which banished ‘frozen tundra’ for being redundant (…
Read More
…et traders gyrate between exultation and despair as corner-office titans enlist the administration’s Objectivists to refill the trillion-dollar cookie jar they’d raided and stocked with imaginary cookies. Has anyone counted the dead in Iraq? Lapel pins, real Americans, water-boarding and what the frak is a credit-default swap anyway? A wise old Zen master boiled the Dharma down to this: Don’t deceive yourself, don’t make excuses and take responsib…
Read More
…nd charities and lives on the remaining 10 percent. Unlike flashy televangelists, he has no interest in large homes, yachts, cars; in fact, he won’t even go on television because, he has said, he wants to support local ministers, not compete with them. He has provided “purpose-driven” curricula and other materials to over 25,000 churches, and hundreds of thousands of pastors have attended seminars or conferences with him and other Saddleback Churc…
Read More
…avoidance activities; 75% hire outside consultants (union-prevention specialists) who set up command centers within the company to wage all-out war on the union; 50% threaten to shut down operations to scare workers; and 25% illegally fire union supporters. These aren’t just economic issues or labor abuses; they are human rights issues, and they were recognized as such in a Human Rights Watch report issued in 2000. In the years since that report c…
Read More…; two same-sex kisses; some rough and crude language; and two uses of profanity.” In addition to their reviews, the USCCB Office of Film and Broadcasting also offer Top Ten Lists from each calendar year beginning with 1965. It is probably safe to say that Hamlet 2 will not top the 2008 list….
Read More
…! Studios has announced a new comic series conceived by actor-turned-evangelist Stephen Baldwin, Comic List reports. BOOM!’s press release describes The Remnant as “A supernatural thriller in the vein of 24,” but the title suggests it’ll be more of a Left Behind knock-off—indeed, it shares its Revelation-inspired title with the tenth book in the Left Behind series. Baldwin states of the series: “I wanted to do a comic that asked the big questions…
Read More
…ade a majority of Californians to heed one element in an otherwise obscure list of purity codes in Deuteronomy—and that Jesus’ preaching in the gospels isn’t really complete without Paul’s finger-wagging in Romans—the stitching that holds together the disparate parts of the Good Book will have subtly but irrevocably loosened, along with the Bible’s centuries-old grip on American public life. Of course, religious conservatives can’t frame their pro…
Read More
From the pantheon of Greco-Roman names in the cast list to the hard-drinking antics of the pagan crew, there is a distinct Dionsysian vibe on the critically adored Battlestar Galactica, now entering its final season on the Sci-Fi channel. There’s no character named Dionysus, it’s true, but we have straight-arrow flyboy Apollo and Cylon turncoat Athena and her existentially tormented human lover, Karl Agathon. Then there’s the simple fact that the…
Read More