Religion Dispatches
…aring in a case brought by human rights activist Maurice Tomlinson against TV stations that refused in 2012 to run a 30-second ad calling for respect for the human rights of LGBTI people. Sri Lanka: Equality group releases pride video EQUAL GROUND released “Nothing But Pride,” a music video that encourages people to be “proud and gay.”…
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…se FedSoc publicly casts itself as a non-partisan debate club, though, the code effectively protects Neil Gorsuch’s sacred right to don a bow tie next time FedSoc conclave rolls around. This ethics code exists largely as a marketing tool for reporters willing to buy what the FedSoc Six are selling, but also as cover for the justices’ clear preferences. Its language, which allows justices to participate in “a nonprofit civic, charitable, educationa…
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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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…n between the rich and poor didn’t play prominently, either in the event’s promos or at the stadium rally itself. PK did offer a “pay what you can afford” program to woo low-income rally-goers, and it also urged attendees to bring food donations for the Denver Rescue Mission. At the rally itself, there was no sustained talk about the spiritual or political effects of the global financial crisis, but there was a call to support something called the…
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…og 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 code name wa…
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…e the sides here? That young children who have same-gender parents are not welcome in our churches? That “welcome, everyone” (the only two words spoken in the ad) is a controversial greeting from our pulpits? That the stares the young boy and his moms get while walking down the aisle are justified? I can’t imagine Sojourners turning down an ad that called for welcome of poor children into our churches. So why is this boy different? I called the fo…
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…ks, “When Superintelligent AI Arrives, Will Religions Try to Convert It?” (Bonus: my interview with Istvan, during which the presidential hopeful is pressed on whether Transhumanism is itself a religious movement.) [Gizmodo] Convergence Zones Our final category, convergence zones, is for articles that discovered unusual intersections between religion and science. Adrienne LaFrance’s, “What Makes a Volcano Sacred?” covers a land battle between as…
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…ld meetings. Rosanna Flamer-Caldera, executive director of Equal Ground in Sri Lanka, said the U.S. election had been “rather a big blow” but that she is keeping her fingers crossed that support from the embassy can continue. Another activist said U.S. retreat from human rights activism would mean “a loss of hope for many people across the globe.” Stern said LGBT concerns are part of a broader human rights framework, and said it is troubling that…
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…cultural conservatism in the United States. The foundation of this source code (the motherlode of the code, as it were) is Catholic natural law moral philosophy. Natural law is the 800-year-old Thomist tradition that absorbs (from revelation and scripture) and communicates (into public discourse and legal practice) a quite specific understanding of the human individual as the summit of God’s creation. First Things has hosted some of the most impo…
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