Religion Dispatches
…eligion is exactly what his legislation is about. And he’s doing it in the spirit of ID, too. In hopes of sounding scientific, ID eschews the word “God” in its official work, opting for an unnamed “designer.” In the same way, Battain goes for the vague and unoffending “higher power.” I have long believed that ID is on its deathbed. It is a scientific non-starter and a theological travesty. It is intellectually infertile. But Brattin makes me think…
Read More…on-personal bodies. The human person is a dynamic unity of body, mind, and spirit. Marriage is what one man and one woman establish when, forsaking all others and pledging lifelong commitment, they found a sharing of life at every level of being—the biological, the emotional, the dispositional, the rational, the spiritual— on a commitment that is sealed, completed and actualized by loving sexual intercourse in which the spouses become one flesh, n…
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…tside the language of the Sikh Gurus, since the Sikh journey is one toward spiritual victory. In the wake of our initial grief and injury, we were inspired by the acts of heroism: the valiant policeman Lte. Brian Murphy, the brave temple president Satwant Kaleka, the precocious young children of 9 and 11 years, Amanat and Abhay, who ran inside the temple warning of the arrival of the armed killer. This appears over and over again in Sikh thought a…
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…en out of view. It asks that any connection that animals might have to the spirit world remain tamely leashed to our household pets. There is a growing movement of people who are not farmers but are trying to get more in touch with their food, a la Michael Pollan, moving toward experiencing the death throes of the creatures they consume. They raise chickens in their urban backyards before butchering them and inviting their friends over to share. T…
Read More…n, even though they take God’s name in vain a few times). Without ever mentioning God, the DNC platform, perhaps less poetically than the writer of Song of Songs, still captures the spirit perfectly: “Love is as strong as death, passion fierce as the grave… Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”…
Read More…o great lengths LGBT people have had to take to be able to worship both in spirit and in truth. The MCC, founded just a few short years before this tragedy, in 1968, by Rev. Troy Perry, has survived many acts of violence in its history, including a fire of “suspicious origin” that destroyed its Los Angeles headquarters in 1973. The denomination began for the simple reason that LGBT people were not welcome in mainstream congregations—not openly, an…
Read More…nti-ENDA letter, which was posted by blogger Jeremy Hooper, is less in the spirit of “who am I to judge” and more in keeping with the scorched-earth culture-war rhetoric coming from the US bishops in their opposition to marriage equality. In order to stake out an anti-ENDA position while still maintaining that the USCCB is aligned with the church’s stated opposition to “unjust discrimination” against “people who experience a homosexual inclination…
Read More…ties and steppes of Southern Siberia. Does the cher eezi (a powerful local spirit) know what color your house is? Does the cher eezi know if you lie? Does the cher eezi know if you lie in Moscow? In all of these situations, even if the cher eezi knows, does it care? We might call this discipline theopsychology: what do I think about what the gods think? The researchers found that Tyvans attributed less knowledge about moral activities, and less co…
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…The thing that I miss most in this flurry of articles? Mention of the holy spirit moving in people’s lives. Encounters with the living God. That is why “looking for Jesus” isn’t enough. At the risk of being a typical Duke grad, I can’t resist quoting Stanley Hauerwas, who says, “I don’t have any faith in myself of living a virtuous life; but if I am surrounded by other people who are also formed by the same commitments, then we’ve got a better cha…
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…ut the SOA and U.S. foreign policy. With two minutes left and moved by the spirit, I recognized an opportunity to express my solidarity with women in the Church, so I said, “We have been discussing the injustice of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. As a Catholic priest, I want to say that there will never be justice in our Church until women can be ordained.” I had about another minute remaining and wanted to say a little more about women prie…
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