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Save This What's the difference between born-again and bad-to-the-bone? Saved! doesn't answer and the press doesn't care. By Patton Dodd Evangelicals on film occupy an odd if unsurprising position: they are almost
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 13 June 2004 12:21 pm: "'I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.'" Berta Delgado of The Dallas Morning News reports on the soon-to-retire Jack Graham, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, who says he's served in a "time of war – not only the war in Iraq, and the worldwide war on terrorism, but a cultural war." 12:06 pm: The European Union's Consitution to remain God-less. 11:52 am: Ronald Brownstein and Faye Fiore on the Sunday Divide. 11:35 am: "Fallouja has become a symbol of a different sort," writes Laura King in the LA Times, now that it has taken on the status of a mini-fiefdom, ruled by insurgents and an austere form of Islamic law. While Western visitors are stalked through its streets, Fallouja residents are warned not to cut their beards, beauty parlors are shut down and illegal alcohol sellers are publicly flogged--devotional repayment for what Falloujans see as their victory over occupying forces. "These laws might not have been fully followed prior to the occupation of our city," said one iman, "but the fact that Americans attacked our holy sites … has made us more sensitive about these issues." A Falloujan government worker drew this moral: "We believe God saved our city. And we believe [Americans] learned a lesson: not to mess with Fallouja." 12 June 2004 12:02 pm: "Taming Wild Horses in God's Eyes." Matt Monaghan on Utah's missionary horse-trainer. 11:55 am: God's face on a bikini. 11:49 am: In Belzec, Poland, a mass grave of 500,000 has been opened to the public with the digging of a viewing trench--a move partially calculated to combat "Holocaust fatigue." Former Holocaust Memorial Museum director, Walter Reich, laments the disturbing of his family dead. Read more. 11:20 am: "Religious tolerance be damned." Joe Bageant in Counterpunch, on "The Covert Kingdom." 10:50 am: In their image: The Washington Post compares the different Reagans evoked by Bushes, Jr. and Sr., who "yesterday identified in Ronald Reagan the separate traits that have defined each of them in the public's eye. The elder Bush, known for courtliness and decency, emphasized Reagan's civility and humility. The younger Bush, by contrast, emphasized Reagan's ideological firmness, and his fierce opposition to communism and big government. He spoke of Reagan's commitment to entrepreneurship, freedom, and the struggle of good against evil -- all themes of his own administration. Perhaps the biggest difference between father and son in their eulogies was the way they portrayed Reagan's religious faith." 11 June 2004 9:10 am: In court: The ACLU has filed a lawsuit against the Nebraska city of Omaha on behalf of a Muslim woman who was barred from entering a city pool while fully clothed. And Brigitte Bardot is convicted in Paris of inciting racial hatred for the negative portrayal of Muslims in her recent book, A Cry in the Silence. 11 June 2004 8:35 am: Bugs and computer chips at the Vatican . 8:24 am: "'Long before there was a Jerry Falwell or a Pat Robertson or even a Tom Delay, there was a Martin Luther King Jr., a Dorothy Day and an Abraham Heschel,'" said John Podesta, a Catholic, the Center's president, and a former Clinton White House staffer. "'For them, justice and fairness in the community was inseparable from their faith in God. That's the real story of religion in American life and we're here to reclaim it.'" Juliana Finucane reports on a Democratic attempt to retake religion. 8:18 am: Via Bartholomew's Notes On Religion: evolutionist author Richard Dawkins frets over the growing influence of religion on state schools in the UK, namely a private, evangelical sponsor, Peter Vardy, who encourages a curriculum of Bible-study and Creationist theory. 10 June 2004 8:44 pm: One of the bloggers at Not Perfection puts the events of the week in perspective. "I feel bad about Ronald Reagan’s passing, but let’s keep perspective. You heard the call for it here first -- put Ray Charles on the ten-dollar bill. Can I get an Amen?" Amen! 4:55 pm: Elizabeth Frankenberger in the Forward on the 75th birthday of Anne Frank: "For me, being Jewish meant that Santa skipped over our house on Christmas, just like God did in Egypt in the Passover story. But Anne's story seemed more real than anything I had ever read in my haggadah, or seen on any after-school television special. Could being Jewish really have been that . . . special?" And Frankenberger on Anne Frank, Buddha-killer... |
 The Day After “Morning in America” Peter Manseau: For better or worse, it is from Ronald Reagan that I and others of my generation, learned the meaning of apocalypse. If not the word itself, then at least the implication of it; the threat. The Possibility. Amid all the endless tributes to the Gipper and the Great Communicator, it is unlikely we will hear many references to Reagan as the reader of signs and portents. We will not be treated to the soundbites that are every bit as apocalyptic as anything found in Left Behind. And yet that, too, is part of his legacy. [ Continue reading: ] What Is It About the O.C.? In the wake of the FBI’s public appeal earlier last week for help locating seven alleged terrorists, observes Julia Rabig, the press responded with profiles of Adam Yahiye Gadahn, the only American citizen among the suspects. Although none of them explicitly links Gadahn to John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban," most try to fit him into the taxonomy of the impassioned California seeker gone awry, an archetype of American journalism. [ Continue reading: ] Facts, Faith, and "The Jesus Factor" Faced with what they must have thought were only two options — to present Bush's religion as fanatical or "normal," Frontline rejected the former as simplistic and embraced the latter as fair. Why is his religion "normal"? Apparently, write Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet, because it's sincere. [ Continue reading: ] Shake Hands with the Devil Gen. Romeo Dallaire, on negotiating with Rwandan genocidairs: Even their hands were cold, but it was like a death cold. Death cold is not a temperature. It's a state. And so I was absolutely talking, negotiating and touching what I would qualify as the most evil, and it is the devil. [ Continue reading: ] NPR's Little Gods A new kind of religion reporting is gaining prevalence in the mainstream press. It is a broader, less disaster-oriented examination of religion that seems, despite its deliberately neutral, accepting and calming tone, like a new form of activist journalism: a good-faith effort to reintroduce faith to public discourse as something non-crusading, non-jihadist. In short, as something different than the end-times horrors creeping off the television screen and closer to where we live. [ Continue reading: ] Orthodoxy & Orthopraxy at NYRB "Michael Ignatieff," Anthony Lewis writes, "brings history, philosophy, law, and democratic morality to bear on the problem." But not, apparently, insight into the role played by religion in the decisions of the president who prefers the advice of a "higher father" to that of his own, former-president father... [ Continue reading: ] Welcome to the Pantheon Thomas Hamill escapes from Iraq and gets drafted into the cult of American Heroes: a minor deity in the pantheon of "characters" with which it sells the war. Who says it "sells" the war? The bottom line. The media must make money from its reportage on Iraq, so it has to sell a story. It can be anti-war or pro-war, but it's always a product. [ Continue reading: ] Who You Calling Feminist? The unfolding of abuse scandals that accelerated in the Catholic Church over the past few years has forced Church hierarchy to contend with new demands for accountability on a range of issues. "Being archbishop of Boston," Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley tells The Boston Globe's Michael Paulson, "is like living in a fishbowl made of magnifying glass." [ Continue reading: ] Pictures from an Inquisition The picture on the left is by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746-1828). It's from a series of notebook sketches he drew in an attempt to depict the Spanish Inquisition's (1478-1834) prosecution of "heretics." The picture on the right is a work by Army Specialist Sabrina Harman. By Jeff Sharlet. [ Continue reading: ] Who Killed Pat Tillman? According to the paper of record, it was the Taliban. Or it was Al Qaeda. Or it was "other fighters." Or maybe it was bandits. Or maybe it was friendly fire. Or maybe it was corrupt Pakistani forces. Maybe it was Osama himself, with a sucker punch and a scimitar. One thing's for sure: It was Them. The evildoers. The opposite of Us. [ Continue reading: ] |
 Fashionable Madmen Joan Didion: "That the ethic of conscience is intrinsically insidious seems scarcely a revelatory point, but it is one raised with increasing infrequency; even those who do raise it tend to segue with troubling readiness into the quite contradictory position that the ethic of conscience is dangerous when it is 'wrong,' and admirable when it is 'right.'" [ Continue reading: ] Godzilla, Born Again If Gojira, the original Japanese Godzilla -- just released in its entirety -- was "the A-bomb made flesh," the American Godzilla is the gospel of the A-bomb. Kathryn Joyce goes to the movies. [ Continue reading: ] The First Noble Truth of Charlie Brown Charles “Sparky” Schulz began his cartooning career at a Catholic magazine called Timeless Topix, but the strip that became his contribution to American letters--"Peanuts," aka Charlie Brown--was the result of a Zen Buddhist-like meditation. [ Continue reading: ] Real Live Preacher Scott M. Korb reviews RLP: "He fancies himself something of a freak, a 'Real Live Preacher' on display through a peephole on the midway of the Internet. And somehow he's both the Coney Island barker and the sideshow oddity. But what’s so odd?" Find out. [ Continue reading: ] How to See Evil Chris Lehmann discusses the end of the world with G.O.P. activist Grover Norquist and bestselling evangelical author Joel C. Rosenberg. [ Continue reading: ] Secular Confessions It’s confession for the voyeur set, with content provided entirely by readers who when they were young “often did gay things,” who have “done nothing but slack off and jerk off for 20 years,” or who “really wish someone would assasinate [sic] Bush.” The confessions are each categorized by the one confessing as a deadly sin, Pride through Anger, with an eighth, add-on category called “Misc.” [ Continue reading: ] Brethren, Can You Spare a Dime? The inclusion of clergy in Leonhardt’s tally of middle and working-class occupations is evidence of a stark reversal of fortune. Historian Julia Rabig writes in to the reveal the ghost of religion in a contemporary story of class and classes. [ Continue reading: ] The Invention of Journalism "Junior used to say he liked to live in hotels because he was a son of Englishmen. When he said 'Englishmen,' he thought of the English who came in the 19th century, of traders and smugglers who abandoned their families and everyone they knew to wander the parts of the world still untouched by the industrial revolution. Solitary and almost invisible, they invented modern journalism because they had left their personal histories behind." —Ricardo Piglia, La ciudad ausente (The Absent City). Translated from Spanish by Margaret at Necrophiliac's Diary. [ Continue reading: ] Who's that Girl? Jeff Sharlet reveals a new motif in the photojournalism coming out of Iraq, an image recurring with such frequency that it may become iconic, a successor to the pictures of Saddam’s statue being pulled down, the pictures of small Iraqi children with big, goodhearted, American lugs, the pictures of Bush in his flight suit. But now, the pictures are harder to parse. And yet just as numerous: There are so many pictures of black-veiled Iraqi women walking past tanks and and Bradley fighting vehicles and American troops with rifles at the ready that you begin to wonder what the news is here, why these particular pictures now? What made photographers start seeing these images? [ Continue reading: ] Welcome to Godsend In the title story of his collection, Welcome to the Monkey House, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. tells us what all sci-fi enthusiasts already know: “science and morals go hand in hand.” The cautionary equation is always the same: advanced technology plus immoral/ hubristic scientist and/or naïve/lazy/ wrongthinking civilian equals one whopping morality tale, reminding us not to mess with God’s plan/fly too high/want what we can’t have. Now the whole sci-fi package comes in a new format: the mock ad campaign. By Kathryn Joyce. [ Continue reading: ] |
