Religion Dispatches
…and the consecration of the first woman bishop, Barbara Harris, in 1989. Roman Catholic women began ordaining themselves in 2004 after an initial irregular ordination by a male bishop in 2002. While these women (who number about 50 priests and five bishops) have been excommunicated, they are living proof that the institutional church has only the power we give it. They go about the business of ministry and service with skill and good grace. Incre…
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…een.” Haitian law already defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, making it unclear what consequences the bill, if passed, would have in practice. Australia: Christian lobbying group warns ruling coalition to stand firm on marriage equality vote Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his Liberal party continued to refuse to allow a parliamentary vote on marriage equality, insisting on a nonbinding national plebiscite to be held first….
Read More…e to law and politics, I might check in with Professors Sally Gordon, Nate Oman, Phil Barlow, or Patrick Mason. They’re all pretty busy this season, but it’s probably worth a call. At the very least, I would use the website LDS.org, which offers a searchable database of talks and writings by church leaders on various subjects over the years. Had Wills done so, he would have quickly located a talk by Elder Dallin H. Oaks, a high-ranking church lead…
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…g is a deliberate echo of Turkey’s, since the territory was part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries.) In Turkey, a popular, democratically elected party, many of whose members are individually pious, is using the ballot box to push an unelected secular elite out of its privileged statist position. If we don’t get this dynamic, we won’t get Muslim politics. I’m not talking about a religious agenda driving a revolution (even though we Americans app…
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…
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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…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…place by the end of 2018. Botswana: Court tells government to allow trans woman to change legal gender A court ordered government officials to allow a transgender woman to change the gender in official registration and on her national Identity Card. Italy: European Court of Human Rights slams failure to recognize same-sex couples’ marriages On December 14 the European Court of Human Rights condemned Italy for refusing to recognize the unions of sa…
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…sition. Saperstein filled a vacancy left by Suzan Johnson Cook, the first woman and African-American to hold that job, and a pastor in the American Baptist Church USA. Those who haven’t been subjected to Brownback’s regressive tax policies (which have nearly bankrupted his home state) or his right-wing political agenda might be wondering what all the fuss is about. Brownback, a proud Catholic, has a long and illustrious history of using the power…
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…s a twist. In the Barnabas, for instance, Judas’ betrayal of Jesus to the Romans prompts God to save Jesus by removing him to heaven and to condemn Judas by changing his face so that it was the betrayer who suffered arrest and indignity: Judas entered impetuously before all into the chamber whence Jesus had been taken up. And the disciples were sleeping. Whereupon the wonderful God acted wonderfully, insomuch that Judas was so changed in speech an…
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