Religion Dispatches
…ou’ll read an excerpt below—has surprised me, too. I wish I could find my airline companion and give him this book, to surprise him, too—in a good way. (I would accept Lakers tickets in lieu of apologies, but I think that particular era is done.) This whole book is a result of a profound evolution, and needs to be seen as such. American Muslims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us ou…
Read MoreAt oral argument in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties, Inc. v. Sebelius this morning, the Supreme Court justices spent a great deal of time questioning the lawyers in the case about whether corporations have a religious conscience, and whether Congress intended to protect it when enacting the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). What was most striking, though, was how all three female justices, Sonia So…
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…ought leader and freedom fighter who moved his family from Indianapolis to North Carolina to challenge the remnants of school segregation following the Brown decision. As early as 2005, when he assumed its presidency, the second William Barber was already refashioning the North Carolina NAACP from a fairly quiescent group into a real thorn in the side of the status quo. And all the while, from 1993 to the present day, Mr. Barber has faithfully ser…
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…te segregation and economic favoritism. When I spoke with Rothstein on the phone, he underscored the long-term effects of this last policy. During the 1940s and 1950s, suburban subdivisions were built in St. Louis, and throughout the country, using federal loans stipulating that no homes be sold to African Americans. Priced at about $125,000 in today’s dollars, these were affordable—with a mortgage—to working class families, black or white. Yet bl…
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…he Indians. – Article XVI: 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie All across South Dakota meetings are being held this week and next on the various Lakota Indian reservations to try and raise enough money to make a bid on the purchase of lands in Paha Sapa, the Black Hills of South Dakota, considered sacred to the Lakota people. The site is called Oceti Sakowin, Pe’ Sla (The Heart of Everything) in the Lakota language and is considered the place where the…
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…ment of 50,000, as if the faithful at church. The devotion was audible, as tickets were distributed to friends of the Cuban government and not through a public sale. Here the religious nature of the Cuban sporting event is acknowledged only to be dismissed as inauthentic. The patriotic, quasi-religious crooning is suspicious because of its apparent production by the Cuban government, which distributed tickets to friends. Morosi recognizes religiou…
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…ust be made to enforce it. In the April 2007 priesthood session, a musical number was provided by a men’s chorus. The chorus was selected and trained by Brigham Young University professor Rosalind Hall, who also chose the music for the choir—but Hall was not allowed to attend the performance; instead, she was replaced by a male colleague, Ronald Staheli, for that one event. In fact, Hall was not even allowed to be in the conference hall to hear he…
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…Against Amendment One, Knight points out that conservative churches far outnumber progressive ones in North Carolina. “They’re encouraging their folks to vote as much as we are,” he said. “It remains to be seen who’s going to be motivated and mobilized to get out there and do it.” As far as media coverage is concerned, Bakker laments that the same-old anti-gay Christian perspective is still the easy go-to. “It’s a strange phenomenon,” he told me:…
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…me shows), even when something unintentional happens—say you know that the airline didn’t intentionally keep you from flying—the question that humans often pose is, “Was this preventable?” “Could they have done something to prevent that?” And that’s when we wonder—well, who could have done something to prevent it? The person at the counter? The pilot? The CEO? We don’t know, and so we have, in a sense, a certain disorientation and don’t know to wh…
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…of community options at the Spearfish Family Planning clinic of the South Dakota Department of Health, says that due to limited midwifery options in her state, some women choose to give birth unassisted or in the hospital. Others cross the border to Montana, a state which recognizes the licensing of CPMs, which in turn affords them the opportunity to publicly advertise their services. But in South Dakota, she says, “there are women who aren’t int…
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