Religion Dispatches
…reating serious backlash among BYU students and faculty. Since then, Honor Code enforcement has been conducted through referrals—even third party referrals—of suspect students to a campus Honor Code office, a system of enforcement that has created significant opportunities for abuse. (When I was a BYU student, it was possible to make an anonymous third-party referral.) Honor Code enforcement on campus has been used to bait and target gays and libe…
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…ol Paduot and his people were forced to flee for their lives when northern Sudanese troops razed the nearby town of Abyei. Shouldering all things together The part of Sudan I am in right now is the site of yet another proxy war, different from the one in Somalia, but with reminiscent undertones. In Somalia, the Shabaab do the bidding of the broader Al Qaeda network and are supported by this global movement. In Abyei, Sudan, the on again, off again…
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…of academics, bloggers and atheists who published views critical of Islam. Sudan: Oral history project documents oppression of sexual and gender minorities Sudanese Queer Voices is a project whose aim is to document the oral histories of LGBTQI people in Sudan. English-language versions of stories are available in a document produced by the Mesahat Foundation for Sexual and Gender Diversity. An introduction reviews the country’s violent political…
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…o include a generous, Federalist Society-shaped loophole. According to the code: Except in unusual circumstances, no such appearance will be created when a Justice speaks to a group of students or any other group associated with an educational institution, a bar group, a religious group, or a non-partisan scholarly or cultural group. As Jay Willis points out: The challenge is that the six conservatives have a favorite “non-partisan scholarly or cu…
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…nt, and a pledge at the end. A final admonition declares that breaking the Code will result in immediate execution. The Code is illustrated with images pulled from a website promoting the 2007 Swedish film Arn: The Knights Templar. This past spring, copies of the Code were mysteriously distributed across Michoacan. Like La Familia, members of the Knights Templar must refrain from drugs and must commit to routine drug testing, but unlike La Famila…
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…llywood Censored. The code they designed became the Motion Picture Conduct Code, popularly know as the Hays Code after it was adopted by William Hays, a Presbyterian elder who was hired by the major studios to help clean up the industry’s image after it was rocked by a series of scandals. The code, says Black, “was a fascinating combination of Catholic theology, conservative politics and pop psychology—an amalgam that would control the content of…
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…rriage in advance of a national referendum on the topic. India: Openly gay Apple CEO meets with Prime Minister Apple CEO Tim Cook is scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which Andy Towle reports is the first time the government leader will host an openly gay CEO on Indian soil, where homosexuality is criminalized. Manu Balachandran at Quartz writes: To be clear, this isn’t the first time Modi is meeting Cook. The two met in the US…
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…te on his blog that he felt that Custer or Columbus would have been a more appropriate code name for bin Laden, and that the use of Geronimo was just another example of how “We’ve been reduced to caricatures as mascots and entertainment in sports and media.” In fact, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee held hearings recently on American Indians and racist stereotypes, and one of the first items of business was a discussion of why this particular…
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…to get his joke about Jews and Chinese food. But Chernoff received rousing applause when he declared, “God is moving among our people” and “Yeshua is the only way.” Coach Mac appeared on stage to speak about what sparked his interest in Jewish-Christian reconciliation, and to introduce material from his new book, Two Minute Warning, where McCartney calls reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles “the biblical pathway to worldwide revival.” In a dra…
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…e New York Review of Books, advocates age restrictions or flat-out bans on app use. Both of these approaches presume a fundamental weakness in human agency. State intervention is the only way, these writers argue, to protect us against ourselves. Well, sort of. These kinds of provisions don’t protect agency so much as they determine an acceptable degree to which it will be lost. They don’t address the deeper social forces and habits of mind that e…
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