Religion Dispatches
…on. That’s been my main beef against organizations like Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church. Saddleback has been a leader in the orphan care movement—they describe it as one of their “signature issues”—but their “Get Informed” page on domestic adoption consists of a downloadable brochure on “steps to adoption,” a guide to tax implications of adoption, and links to agencies working in Rwanda. Last year I asked Warren’s PR firm for comment on how his co…
Read More…urported 2012 “end of the world” to explain the seismic activity. I’ve collected a sample of these below for you to see through Google’s real-time twitter feed. From the small sample, it’s safe to say there is a “fatalistic” understanding that natural disasters are about sin or God’s wrath. Even insurance companies think so, placing the phrase “Acts of God” as a catchall for everything unexplainable and destructive. Disasters seem to bring out som…
Read More…the issue has been contentious in the largely Catholic country, which has fac*]}*ed religious opposition to same-sex marriages and adoption. A 2013survey found that 52 percent of Mexicans supported same-sex marriage rights, but only 24 percent backed the adoption of children by such couples. The Roman Catholic Church opposes same-sex marriage and adoption, but it has said that it will not refuse to baptize any children. Malaysia: Civil and Shariah law…
Read More…truggle Coming Out Ruth Davidson, a lesbian and Scottish Tory leader, told BBC Radio Scotland that she had struggled with her sexuality for years before coming out. From Pink News: “But there comes a point at which you make a decision and that decision is either that you’re going to live a lie for the rest of your life, or you’re going to trust yourself, and that’s what I had to do.” She went on to talk about how her Church of Scotland upbringing…
Read More…by suggesting otherwise, Rosengren suggested. Hong Kong: Activists Protest BBC Censorship of Lesbian Kiss in ‘Dr. Who’ Gay Asia news reports that gay rights activists are “outraged” that the BBC cut a lesbian kiss scene in the first episode of the new season of Dr. Who. The BBC Worldwide’s London-based compliance team made the cut to conform with laws against same-sex relations and broadcast content in Asian countries such as Muslim majority Malay…
Read More
…holic crusade against the Cathars, a heretical Christian sect, lasted two decades; one battle, the siege of Béziers, resulted in the massacre of thousands, including clerics, women, and children. Nor do the history standards ask students to show how, say, Islam was “a unifying factor” in the Muslim world, or Confucianism was “a unifying factor” in China. Another standard locates the origins of three key legal concepts—trial by jury, presumption of…
Read More
…rmed. So does the case of Bethany prove that my skepticism has been wrongheaded? That all evangelicals need is a little more compassion and understanding from “liberals” and the press, and eventually they’ll come around? It would be nice if that were the case, but in fact the changes at Bethany, which have been a long time coming, evidently resulted from external pressures, meaning that continuing to coddle evangelicals and other social conservati…
Read More…because “child welfare providers who believe that children deserve to be plac*]}*ed with a married mother and father… [are] being subjected to discrimination because of their sincerely held religious beliefs and moral convictions.” They also held that parents placing children for adoption should be free to chose an agency that “shares the parents’ religious beliefs and moral convictions.” To date, a number of Catholic Charity adoption agencies, includ…
Read More
…than be connected with any policy that would prevent children from being plac*]}*ed in loving homes regardless of the gender constellation of the parents. Alas, there is a shortage of shame here. However, it is important to underscore that no Catholic theology of sexuality, however narrow, trumps the demands of justice and the works of mercy as Catholic imperatives. Several dynamics in this deal make it especially heinous. First, the timing is suspici…
Read More…d to facilitate self-determination. Human Rights Watch called it “a much needed roadmap for a region in which at least 33 countries still require humiliating and invasive procedures as a precondition for legal gender recognition.” Vatican: Pope praises male-female ‘complementarity,’ does not accept gay ambassador Francis is making it harder for equality-supporting Catholics to maintain optimism about his tenure. We reported last week that the Vati…
Read More