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For those of you who haven’t had the experience of attending a mainline seminary or studying the Bible in an academic institution, the Essenes are almost as much a matter of contemporary Biblical orthodoxy as the historical-critical method.
I just finished watching this season’s second to last episode of HBO’s Big Love soap opera, and I believe there may be another hidden reason that the show makes Mormons uneasy. Much of the media’s attention has been on the fact that this episode portrayed a scene in a Mormon temple, however, the show did have one line that caught me: the main character expressly claimed that the Mormon church was just as corrupt as the show’s main antagonists who are practicing polygamy and generally in trouble with the law.
There is some real irony in this week’s apology from HBO regarding their anticipated controversial portrayal of a Mormon temple’s “sacred endowment ceremony” in the amazingly entertaining and insightful Sunday night soap opera Big Love. The show, which features a Utah polygamous family dealing with the challenges if interacting with both the secular world and with their fundamentalist roots, is genuinely known for portraying conservative religious beliefs quite sympathetically. Some would even say that it is (arguably) “one of the most sympathetic portraits” of such beliefs.
“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King Jr. preached at Washington National Cathedral in March 1968. Robert Wright agrees, sort of, writing in the April Atlantic that “whether or not history has a purpose, its moral direction is hard to deny.” Wright’s essay is an 8,000-word argument that the three great monotheistic faiths may help create a more beneficent world through globalization.
Since the day this blog opened for business, your GetReligionistas been saying the same thing over and over about the structure of modern American religion.
I’ve never been one of those parents who worries about exposing her kids to fantasy worlds, whether they be those of of J.K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket, or C.S. Lewis. Reading them and talking about them together allows their young minds to stretch their imaginations and distinguish truth from fiction.
Why did Lahore, Pakistan, think it was different? And different from what? Much has been made about how Lahore was perceived as different since the brutal, daylight attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team.
A GetReligion reader with an intense interest in history, especially in northern Africa and other regions bordering the Middle East, sent me the URL of to this haunting multi-media feature by CNN Senior International Correspondent Nic Robertson.
Those rowdy Anglican conservatives out there are very upset that the mainstream press has not paid more attention to the election of Father Kevin Thew Forrester as the new bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Northern Michigan. If you wish, click here to get a sense of just how upset they are.
