Religion Dispatches
…Catholics and others who want to see the Pope may be losing heart. 10,000 tickets for the Pope’s Speech at Independence Mall sold out in two minutes on Tuesday, with 394k people trying their best to get a few. Tickets are already being scalped at $100 and up on craigslist. I didn’t get one, but my citizen journalist dues are current. Stay tuned….
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…sites actually shape people’s responses to deep theological questions? Can search results and search engine optimization influence the beliefs of an individual confronting a difficult question? It’s hard to tell. But as people go online for answers to religious questions, fundamentalist and fringe religious groups do have chances to dominate the search results and stake out authoritative-sounding positions, regardless of their influence offline. Y…
Read More…ltures, including China, Japan, the Republic of Korea and Viet Nam in East Asia as well as in many South Asian societies. In some societies, tolerance of sexual diversity is believed to exist as long as it is not visible, and men demonstrate masculinity through heterosexual marriage and fathering children. Marriages of convenience to alleviate societal and family pressure are also reportedly not uncommon in Indonesia and Mongolia. In some instance…
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…notions of “human dignity” and “human flourishing,” Catholic natural law—an 800-year-old tradition dating back to Thomas Aquinas—is a lens that offers utter clarity to conservative Catholic jurists, activists, policymakers, and scholars as they observe, describe, and engage the world. The power and sharpness of this lens allow them to confidently snap every human movement—every human desire and motive and act—into its divinely appointed and proper…
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…, not the fourth century … You’re not free to practice your religion in my airline seat.’ ‘This is male entitlement .. the height of male arrogance.’ One comment referred to this as a ‘back of the bus’ issue; as in, women being asked to move in such circumstances was tantamount to assigning them a lesser status as citizens and lower dignity as human beings. Other readers proposed that airlines set aside special seating for men requiring such accom…
Read More…l truth” and excludes sites that don’t meet that standard. Houdmann says a search on his site would not turn up pornography. If you search “gay marriage,” you would get results that argue against gay marriage. And if you type in “Democratic Party,” your first search result is a site on Marxism. But SeekFind isn’t the only search engine carving a niche market among religious Internet users. There is also Jewogle for Jews and I’mHalal, a Muslim sear…
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Adam Clayton Powell called it “cheap grace,” but we might call it “cheap atonement”: the effort by sinners to select which sins to acknowledge and repent. Pope Benedict XVI ended his heavily protested visit to England with a heartfelt apology for German bombings of England during the Battle of Britain; though he refused to accept Christian responsibility for the Holocaust, blaming it instead on pagans and atheists. Given that Cardinal Walter Kasp…
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…obal headlines of mob violence and lynchings. For those of us in the South Asian diaspora, these headlines are painful to read. For some of us, our friends and family back home are under threat. But unfortunately, not everyone agrees on how to break free from this cycle. The predictable cycles of religious violence in South Asia can be described fairly simply. First, a member of a religious or ethnic minority is accused of offending the religious…
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…way from the hard work of repentance, who tickle our ears with promises of cheap grace, and offer a vision of the cross of Jesus that has nothing to say to the crosses, and lynching trees, of history. But, if we do, we will be settling for the gospel of Caesar, not the good news of Jesus Christ. Perhaps it is time to put down the chalk, stop drawing pyrotechnical conspiracy theories that play into our worst fears and listen, instead, for the diffi…
Read More…“next-frontier” for marriage equality. The conference was followed on Saturday by Asia’s biggest gay pride parade. This year’s march coincides with several events held in Taipei, including a queer film festival and a regional LGBT conference. “Taiwan certainly is one of the more progressive in Asia,” said Ashley Wu, co-chair of this year’s conference which attracted about 400 activists from countries including China, Thailand, Cambodia, and Nepal….
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