A Germ of Believability
Abby Ohlheiser: So, did you hear that, following New York’s lead, The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) now recognizes and embraces same-sex marriage? It’s on the internet, so it must be true. Or not. Continue Reading →
Tag: abby ohlheiser
Global Evangelicals: Prudes vs. Oppressed
Abby Ohlheiser: As some in the media try to speculate on the role of religion in the GOP primaries and the 2012 elections, Pew and Gallup are polling for a clue. But a separate Pew poll last week caught my eye: a survey of 2,196 leaders (representing 166 countries) of evangelical leaders from the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization. The leaders, mostly male, middle-aged (only 5% were under the age of 30), and college educated, were asked questions that seemed intent on creating a clearer picture of what global “evangelical” Christianity is by qualifying the cluster of practices and beliefs in their most amorphous form. Continue Reading →
Terry Jones Takes Dearborn
Yesterday Terry Jones held another rally in Dearborn, Michigan, outside the Arab International Festival, to raise awareness for the encroachment of Islam in America. Abby Ohlheiser was there.
This was the plan: Terry Jones would speak at City Hall then march with his supporters up to the annual Arab International Festival in Dearborn, MI, a city with one of the largest Arab populations in the country. The walk is 13 blocks. He got half a block before police put him in a car. Six protesters from the affirmative action group By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) were arrested. The rest stood in his path, yelling, getting as close as they could without touching. Jones wore a bullet proof vest under his white t-shirt, as did his friend and fellow speaker pastor Wayne Sapp.
Last time Jones was in Dearborn, he was pelted with shoes and water bottles, something repeatedly referenced today. But he keeps coming back. Regardless of the angle, there’s something going on here, some importance perceived by, at least, Jones, that his message be heard in this place at this time. He’s going to return again, he said, even after the mob. And likewise, his presence makes Dearborn a site for others–his detractors, his supporters with side causes of their own–to get attention for their messages.
Before the rally began, Jones asked his supporters to join him for a pep talk. “If you’re taking a stand with us we’d like you up to the fence real quick,” he said. Jones told the small gathered crowd, maybe 30 people, about the size of the counter protest (and the media presence, who were pushed against the edge of the press pen trying to hear), “What’s very important is that we will not in any way retaliate…in every sense they will see god’s love and patience.” Continue Reading →
Weird Waves are the New Heat Waves
Abby Ohlheiser: It’s not global warming, it’s global weirding, according to a Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) article, prophetically published last Friday to ready us for today’s choking heat along the East Coast. CBN has recently published a series of articles (read here, here and here) rekindling doubt in the evidence for global warming. In doing so, CBN is building an argument against the idea that human action can change the Earth’s climate. There’s a godly element to that. There’s also a business one. Continue Reading →
WorldNetDaily, Salon, and the Creation of Fact
by Abby Ohlheiser
WorldNetDaily, a right-wing news site, is probably best known for flaming the fires of the birther conspiracy, and for coverage of Sha’riah law bans in America. The tone ranges from threatening to hysterical. That’s with an emphasis on the Victorian female sort of hysterical, not the comedy gold kind. Last Monday, the site’s publisher and CEO, Joseph Farah, admitted in an email to Salon reporter Justin Elliott that his site publishes “some misinformation by columnists.”
This was in the course of defending the site’s journalistic integrity to Elliott, who had published a post earlier that day mentioning WorldNetDaily as the source of Donald Trump’s false claim that President Obama has spent $2 million on legal fees to fight lawsuits questioning his native birth.
Farah made an argument for a distinction between opinion and news journalism that should be familiar by now: essentially the argument says that opinion writing is exempt from the rigorous fact checking and therefore beyond the sort of criticism levied at poor (or, perhaps, politically inconvenient) reporting that might otherwise discredit a story, publication, or network. Never you mind who quotes the not-necessarily-true opinion pieces as factual, or how that slippery, treacherous, holy separation between opinion and news changes the standards of journalism itself. Continue Reading →
Consumption of The Borgias: A Viewer’s Guide
by Meghan Maguire Dahn and Abby Ohlheiser
“You are so beautiful, Giulia Farnese, I would have you painted,” declares Jeremy Irons’s Pope Alexander VI in Showtime’s new series The Borgias. It’s not surprising. The lighting in The Borgias is sumptuous and if there’s one thing they light particularly well, it’s the desirable flesh. It’s all positively luminous, like pigment suspended in oil.
And, really, what else would you expect? The viewer-attracting meat of this show is its meticulously constructed tension between our understanding of Catholic virtue and our expectations for scintillating cable entertainment. Showtime is marketing The Borgias as some sort of historical Sopranos – a crime family with pretty costumes, big meals, and the juxtaposition of religion and naughty bits. But The Borgias is a bit more complicated than that: the series is about getting and keeping absolute power, in the name of God.
Let’s be clear about God’s role here. The Borgia family – and their enemies and friends – talk about God like a Brit might talk about the Queen. God is real, but mostly ceremonial. The important action happens in the City of Man. This is not Augustine’s Catholic Church. Instead of withdrawing from worldly delights, the cardinals turn up their nose at gruel and scoff at the suggestion of fasting, carnal sacrifice be damned. Continue Reading →
Consumption of The Borgias: A Viewer’s Guide
by Meghan Maguire Dahn and Abby Ohlheiser
“You are so beautiful, Giulia Farnese, I would have you painted,” declares Jeremy Irons’s Pope Alexander VI in Showtime’s new series The Borgias. It’s not surprising. The lighting in The Borgias is sumptuous and if there’s one thing they light particularly well, it’s the desirable flesh. It’s all positively luminous, like pigment suspended in oil.
And, really, what else would you expect? The viewer-attracting meat of this show is its meticulously constructed tension between our understanding of Catholic virtue and our expectations for scintillating cable entertainment. Showtime is marketing The Borgias as some sort of historical Sopranos – a crime family with pretty costumes, big meals, and the juxtaposition of religion and naughty bits. But The Borgias is a bit more complicated than that: the series is about getting and keeping absolute power, in the name of God.
Let’s be clear about God’s role here. The Borgia family – and their enemies and friends – talk about God like a Brit might talk about the Queen. God is real, but mostly ceremonial. The important action happens in the City of Man. This is not Augustine’s Catholic Church. Instead of withdrawing from worldly delights, the cardinals turn up their nose at gruel and scoff at the suggestion of fasting, carnal sacrifice be damned. Continue Reading →
Consumption of The Borgias: A Viewer's Guide
by Meghan Maguire Dahn and Abby Ohlheiser
“You are so beautiful, Giulia Farnese, I would have you painted,” declares Jeremy Irons’s Pope Alexander VI in Showtime’s new series The Borgias. It’s not surprising. The lighting in The Borgias is sumptuous and if there’s one thing they light particularly well, it’s the desirable flesh. It’s all positively luminous, like pigment suspended in oil.
And, really, what else would you expect? The viewer-attracting meat of this show is its meticulously constructed tension between our understanding of Catholic virtue and our expectations for scintillating cable entertainment. Showtime is marketing The Borgias as some sort of historical Sopranos – a crime family with pretty costumes, big meals, and the juxtaposition of religion and naughty bits. But The Borgias is a bit more complicated than that: the series is about getting and keeping absolute power, in the name of God.
Let’s be clear about God’s role here. The Borgia family – and their enemies and friends – talk about God like a Brit might talk about the Queen. God is real, but mostly ceremonial. The important action happens in the City of Man. This is not Augustine’s Catholic Church. Instead of withdrawing from worldly delights, the cardinals turn up their nose at gruel and scoff at the suggestion of fasting, carnal sacrifice be damned. Continue Reading →
Listening, with Monks
Abby Ohlheiser: Of Gods and Men (122 minutes, 2010), a new film by Xavier Beauvois, opened last Friday in Los Angeles and New York (at Sunshine, show times are here) after a brief run at the New York Film Festival in the fall. Winner of the second-place prize at last year’s Canne Film Festival, it is brilliant, in the way that Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc is brilliant. Continue Reading →
Eyes on Egypt: What to Watch
Abby Ohlheiser and Jessamy Klapper: Below are some of the writers and resources we’ve been using to track the continuing protests in Egypt:
Liveblogs: If you burned out on Al Jazeera English’s live video feed (and the filling of airtime in between new news bits), or simply can’t access it online or on cable, the following ongoing projects update quickly with developments as they happen. Continue Reading →