Religion Dispatches
…raditional religion under siege in popular culture? Are the new atheists, abetted by comedians like Bill Maher and Julia Sweeney, providing cultural running room for atheists and strong agnostics; those who aver, ‘I don’t know and neither do you’? (Sweeney’s Letting Go of God is currently on Showtime.) But back to Modern Family, and this episode’s second act, in which Manny (Rico Rodriguez), Jay’s stepson, weighs in on Jay’s nature spirituality. O…
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…l court in New York for allegedly violating federal racketeering statutes (RICO) as we used the mail and phones to discuss how to counter their efforts to promote pseudo-scientific theories in court. That suit was eventually dismissed but not before causing considerable trouble and expense for those scholars. Singer and Ofshe then refiled the suit in California state court as a libel action, but that too was eventually dismissed, and Singer and Of…
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…nders” and people living with HIV/AIDS. The law sparked a fresh round of house-to-house searches and arrests. Nigeria: Challenges of living under ‘Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act’ The Nigerian Tribune features a story on the challenges facing the country’s LGBT community: Nigeria’s Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act, of 2013, which took effect in January 2014, made a bad situation much worse for the already subdued Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and…
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…t’s not so much that people are using the “wrong” psychological mechanisms, but they need to be offered the information that allows them to make slightly better use of the psychological mechanisms that they have and inevitably will use….
Read More…ears as a key factor in support for sensible, comprehensive reform that focuses on border security, creates guest worker programs, and “normalizes” the status of the undocumented. But Labrador has almost certainly been the beneficiary as well of political cover provided by the Utah Compact—a self-described “common sense” approach to immigration reform signed by state leaders in 2010 and hailed by the New York Times as a model—and one of its key in…
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…if they were colo(red). But St. Bono, you can do better. We need you to do better, because this tiny taste of do-gooding may actually be counter-productive. No decent person would ever fight you that AIDS is a bad thing or that poverty should be eased. A crowd full of middle-aged women isn’t going to argue against their place in history being properly annotated. But spare me the pandering and corporate liberalism, that thin spiritual experience of…
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…democracy by extending the slave system, pitting poor whites against black freedmen to divide the Southern working class in order to avoid the development of a unified, robust labor movement in the South after the Civil War. Today, the powers that be continue to utilize a divide-and-conquer strategy to keep the poor divided along color lines and other lines of division. The original Poor People’s Campaign was King’s solution for building the unity…
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…ve been harshly criticized. Several speakers argued that NAR should not be used because, even among those in the movement, most have never heard of it. Of course there are many standard terms used by scholars and journalists that lay members of religious movements and institutions may be unfamiliar with, like Mainline Protestantism, Catholic integralism, and premillennial dispensationalism, to name just a few. The simple fact is that there’s nothi…
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…he result,” say Hacker and Pierson, “was a boon for the post-materialist causes of more affluent liberals, but it left traditional material causes with only a handful of energetic backers.” I couldn’t put it any better. In my own work, I am sometimes asked why I, as a gay clergy leader, remain so committed to worker issues. The implication: Don’t I know what’s really important? And Now What? What will be really interesting is to see what comes nex…
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…in New York, which has an enormous pedigree, has done wonderful things in promoting a way of life and developing American society, but at the end of the day is still socialist. This is a slightly disguised echo of the charge that has circulated among anti-Semites at least as early as the October 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia when a pamphlet titled “The Jewish Bolshevism” was circulated along with the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion…
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