Religion Dispatches
…we find an investment advisor named Sean Hyman pushing “The Biblical Money Code,” which claims that advice “woven” into Scripture has helped him go from earning $15,000 to giving away up to $50,000 a year. Unlike Hovind, Hyman is giving away his system for free. All you have to do is sit through an hour-long video, during which Hyman explains how “to unlock vast amounts of wealth safely and ethically.” Fancy explanations are provided, but it’s act…
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…hanaian traditional leader, Nana Amba Eyiaba, Queen Mother of the original Cape Coast area; as well as college, seminary, and university professors from Africa and the United States. Beginning with its opening ceremony, the meeting celebrated the diversity of African-descended women even as it sought to build upon the commonality of African ancestry. Traditional Ghanaian drummers and dancers began the conference with an ebullient welcome. Amid…
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…ong” for May and the Conservative Party to be aligning themselves with and promoting “an organization that promotes hatred, homophobia and misogyny born of religious fundamentalism and masquerading as religious freedom.” The UK’s general election will be held on June 9. Poland: Warsaw Pride parade draws crowd in spite of opposition from church, gov’t, nationalists A crowd estimated by organizers at 50,000 people and by police at 13,000 marched in…
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…frica, who were among 13 human rights activists detained and charged with “promoting homosexuality,” were deported: Local police chief Lazaro Mambosasa said they had been “promoting homosexuality”. “Tanzanian law forbids this act between people of the same sex, it is a violation of our country’s laws,” said Mambosasa. Just days later an NGO, the Community Health Education Services and Advocacy (CHESA) centre, was suspended on the same charge and a…
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…e of social and community values in pictures.” For the next 38 years, that code shaped Hollywood’s output. The Production Code insisted that movies were primarily “to be regarded as entertainment” that would “improve the race.” As such, movies should avoid explicit images that would be upsetting or play to “the lower and base element.” Those images included graphic violence, “excessive passion,” “white-slavery,” “scenes of actual child birth,” and…
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…convincing was this product launch, complete with Facebook ad campaign and promotional website including a promo video that went viral, that a number of customers were disappointed and angry to find out that it was a fake. Part of the confusion seems to have been that the launch occurred on March 28, not the customary April 1. But just as important was consumer demand. Enough people were convinced by the slick product rollout that they actually wa…
Read More…mer athletes of color who had a positive experience with BYU and the Honor Code: “If Darron Smith wasn’t so hell bent on exposing BYU, the Church and the honor code office as racists, he’d find out that for every Thomas Stancil, Tico Pringle and Ray Hudson, there’s a Brandon Davies, Reno Mahe and Brian McDonald, the latter of which recovered from an alcohol-related probation, joined the Church and served a mission to Washington, DC.” Sikahema’s fu…
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…but cry out: ‘God, why hast thou forsaken me, seeing the malefactor hath escaped and I die unjustly?’ By this account, God saved the righteous Jesus and punished the wicked Judas. It is those who do not trust in God to intervene, in fact, who are said in the GBarn to hide Jesus’ body and claim his resurrection. This causes God to intervene yet again, returning Jesus to earth so that his mother and true disciples can know the truth: …Those disciple…
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…interests, for some this incident revealed that the people controlling the code have a lot of power. If one thinks that marketing agents put “Bible” in the code, then they might think of them as predatory, or presumptuous about U.S. Christians and their political affiliations. They might become angry that companies have such power in shaping the public’s perception of Christianity and, indeed, in shaping Christians’ own ideas about their communiti…
Read More…, and in what manner to express or not express these rights. It’s when the code that translates these rights for us somehow ceases to function properly in the background that problems result. I want to suggest that often when problems crop up around religious or religiously-motivated speech in the United States, they often have less to do with rights per se than with the unwritten code that determines how these rights are to be taken. At least tha…
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