Religion Dispatches
I’m not here to kvetch about the adaptation of a landmark book into film. That is boring. And I really enjoyed On the Road the movie, which features some truly inspired casting, excellent performances all around, and a much stronger integration of the writer’s voice with the action of the film than, for example, the somewhat clunky Howl. What I am interested in is the way in which On the Road’s spiritual essence has been diluted.
Read More
I hate to break it to you, but Noah’s Flood is not a real thing. As geologist David Montgomery wrote in his recent history, The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood, the religious idea that the Flood was real has been to the actual history of geology as a science. But by now, however, science knows better. I can’t say as much for the media.
Read More
This list, in links and headlines, just skims the surface. But it gives a sense of what to watch for in 2013.
Read More
An RD holiday sampler of stories & viewpoints we would have liked to read in 2012.
RD talks to Mark Van Stone, author of 2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya, who claims that the real lesson of the Maya is that they showed us how to destroy a civilization by stupidly using up their environment and by not planning for a bad year.
Read More
The far left and the far right agree on many things: mainstream politics doesn’t matter, hidden forces control our destiny, and, in case you hadn’t noticed, the world is about to end.
Read More
I knew something horrific had happened just from my friend Lisa’s email: “R U watching the news?” When you report on violence, when your family has been pierced by violence, people assume you are interested in violence. And you are. Very.
Read More
We remember child martyrs in the crusades, young Holocaust victims like Anne Frank, the deaths of Emmett Till and four little girls in Birmingham, Alabama. The children of the day care center in Oklahoma City. Our enduring image from that dark day is a fireman, soaked in blood, carrying a baby on the cover of the magazines. Youth move us because they bring to the light the existential horror of no future.
Read More
In Monterrey, where Jenni had just performed what was to be her final concert, fans processed the streets carrying candles and images of her, just as in the religious processions that have occurred throughout Latin America since the arrival of the Spanish over five hundred years ago. From Mexico to California, shrines in her honor have surfaced in neighborhoods and lawns.
Read More
Without the framing device of community, without any context in which to shape the interpretation of the events, such images become simply sensational, the prick of pain without the moral payoff.
Read More