Religion Dispatches
…f internet technological and capacity innovation before the advent of the smart phone. And if we want to start a serious conversation about where presidential candidates get their money and how ethical that money is, let’s do it. I have a laundry list of labor, environmental, feminist, and human rights issues with multinational corporations I’d love to start working through. But don’t give me a thin, opportunistic connect-the-Mormon-dots story a…
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…bout their personal lives in order to answer God’s calling. (Check out the list of bloggers on Wallis’ “God’s Politics” blog. Can you find an out gay person among them?) By refusing to take sides, men like Wallis and Claiborne only reinforce the need to hide for the sake of serving the kingdom of God. While it is commendable that Sojourners seeks to defend gay people against physical or legal harm, their unwillingness to fight for their spiritual…
Read More…her GOP candidates. In 2012, they have expanded their candidate invitation list. In 2008, Perry—possibly in a preview of the focus of a presidential run—invited pastors to a Policy Briefing by invoking Islamophobia (via the Texas Freedom Network): Both our nation and our Judeo Christian heritage are under attack by a force that is more dangerous than any threat our world has faced in recent memory. I am convinced that our ability to defeat the rad…
Read More…iana. Well, last week, the Foundation for Thought and Ethics appeared on a list of publishers who plan to submit supplementary materials for review this spring by the Texas Board of Education for its science curriculum. So what is the Foundation for Thought and Ethics? The same folks who published Pandas and People, the intelligent design textbook that was featured so prominently in the trial of Kitzmiller v. Dover five years ago. These were the s…
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…t was used to score an indelible moment in Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, in which a little girl in red runs unnoticed through the black and white world of Nazi-occupied Poland. Only later do we see her in a pile of bodies. Despite its frequent dramatic use as a death knell, the popularity of “Oyfn Pripetchik” continues no doubt thanks to its theme of the resilience of Jewish memory. Following the lyrics above, the point at which the singin…
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…ong the things we’d intended to do in July and August of 2003—an ambitious list that included things like getting married, moving to a new state, buying our first house, starting a doctoral program (me), and trying to find a job (my husband)—we had not planned also to conceive a child. It seemed like a bad time to do that, under the circumstances. But there our son was, announcing his presence with a second pink line on a pee-stick, in stubborn de…
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…n Nature and Grace By suggesting we see Tree of Life not in terms of a dualistic choice, but as a “middle way,” I also mean to trigger a Buddhist sensibility to the film that runs alongside the more overtly Christian one. There is no space to develop a full account of this here, but it is worth mentioning that a “Buddhist reading” is entirely plausible. In fact, many of Malick’s films—in terms of cinematography, mise-en-scene, soundtrack, and edi…
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…antorum (okay, this last one is short on charisma but people still seem to listen anyway)—is critical to the success of this religious movement, with the primary sacred textual sources legitimating the moral universe drawn from the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. What is the operative creed for Republicanity? This is, by no means, an exhaustive list: Money rules and wealth is the greatest good; the natural world is at the disposal o…
Read More…anwhile, Perry’s supporters are going public. After news broke of televangelist James Robison’s secret meetings with Perry and religious conservative leaders, Robison released a complete list of those leaders on his blog. Referring to his September 2010 and June 2011 meetings as “supernatural gatherings,” Robison was obviously trying to rebut speculation that the group was supporting Perry for president, but rather that they were just feeling the…
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…epent of “any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin”—a list that includes transgressions as varied as usury, “undue delay of marriage,” and “immoderate use of meat.” (What now for patrons of Brazilian steakhouses?) Of course, the struggle for full acceptance of LGBT people began way before efforts to repeal the so-called “fidelity and chastity” rule. Many folks mark the 1974 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church as the…
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