Religion Dispatches
…e, fully-functional and fully-professional team, and have cleaned up their online presence. In addition, they have controlled their messaging, and the view from New York was that they were making progress in repairing broken relationships. All of this work went on while Abdul-Rauf was silent. Now he starts making statements on something over which he has no control, but over which he exercises a disproportionate impact on in public discourse. He d…
Read More…during the Super Bowl. Meanwhile, FOX has rejected a Super Bowl ad from an online store named “Jesus Hates Obama.” Was Mark Twain anti-Christian? Philip Yancey, an Evangelical writer popular among conservative Christians, will speak at the Gay Christian Network’s conference this year. Michael Youseff, a leader on the religious right, declared that the Episcopal Church is not Christian nor is it “Jesus’ church,” because of its stances on gay-rights…
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…or perhaps because they are, themselves, true believers, major news media online and in print have rushed to interview Kurzweil and profile his ideas over the past few years. Most recently, Time magazine has labeled the Singularity a “serious hypothesis…an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation.” Where once Kurzweil was listed among the fringe and suspected of being just a bit off-balance, in the past few years (especially since founding his…
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…n outside help. Much of the story is being documented at a self-appointed, online “Shimano Archive” to a degree of granularity of detail that is, in and of itself, rather remarkable. The situation, on the face of it, provides a point of departure for contemplation. In it, we can see aspects of ourselves, and Buddhism relation to other traditions; as well as key dynamic elements within Buddhism. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, another seminal founder of Zen…
Read More…refusing to negotiate with terrorists. Doritos yanked an ad entered in its online Super Bowl commercial contest because it substituted Pepsi and Doritos for bread and wine in the Eucharist. Evangelical leader Frank DeMoss has decided to shut down his Civility Project—which sought to keep political discourse, well, civil. Despite asking every member of Congress and every state governor to take his civility pledge, DeMoss could only convince three p…
Read More…e reported the elimination of racist theology from chapter headings in the online edition of the Book of Mormon here at RD late last week, readers have written to point out that verses linking dark skin to accursedness remain in the Book of Mormon itself. Which is entirely true. Look deep into the Book of Mormon, even the newly-updated on-line version, and you will still find verses like Alma 3:6 reporting that “the skins of the Lamanites were dar…
Read More…eating religion’s influence on the life of the world. The point of our new online religion feature is to provide a forum for such sane and spirited talk, drawing on a remarkable panel of distinguished figures from the academy, the faith traditions, and journalism. It will be interesting to see if the Post continues to believe that someone who thinks, for example, that all Muslim organizations have terrorism lurking right beneath the surface or th…
Read More…rief in the Michigan case, which is headed to the Court of Appeals, via an online petition for its “Committee to Declare Pro-Abortion ObamaCare Unconstitutional.” If anti-choice groups can’t succeed in challenging the law in court, at least on the abortion question the new chair of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, Rep. Joe Pitts, one of the most virulently anti-choice members of the House, plans to try to attempt a legislative rollb…
Read More…aggressive attempt at outreach, federal agencies, in conference calls and online seminars, instructed faith-based groups on how to apply for the grants, and federal officials sometimes stepped in when the state officials who distribute the money were reluctant to spend it on groups associated with churches and other religious establishments. I wouldn’t say that this effort was unpublicized, at least for reporters who covered Obama’s Office of Fai…
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…ymous they may be, but brave they are as well. The other comment I’ve seen online among alumni is that some find the webzine offensive: “harsh,” “poorly written,” or hyperbolically, “hate speech” and “pornography.” Harding University President David Burke said, in an address to the college’s daily chapel audience, that he couldn’t even state the name of the website, HUQueerPress.com, because the “address itself is offensive to me.” (Is it the word…
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