Religion Dispatches
…The law of the land is marriage between and man and a woman and that needs to be upheld.” Freshman Republican Mike Pompeo of Kansas chimed in, “we cannot use military to promote social ideas that do not reflect the values of our nation.”…
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…ing pundits who otherwise couldn’t give a damn about the life of faith because it gives them the opportunity to wax on about how the Democrats are doing everything wrong. Likewise, what the Biden VP campaign used to refer to as the “bedwetter caucus,” otherwise known as anonymous “senior Democratic strategists” have been out fretting about Dems taking on Barrett’s faith, among other things. All of this is quite ridiculous. Like any sane political…
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…seated sense of awareness of difference. When I was a young trans queer, I used to love visiting the Texas statehouse, with its statuesque building that I believed was filled with good people committed to making our beloved state better. I loved standing underneath the rotunda that was as round as the Texas sky is big. I enjoyed traversing the state—from Big Bend to the Panhandle—and, back then, did not know the fear that I do now when I think of…
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…“helping other people.” Thoreau avoided philanthropic enterprises not because he resented helping other people (there are too many examples in which he did provide help to others) but because he thought philanthropy was usually driven by selfishness. He wrote: “Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates it.” Philanthropy, he thought,…
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…e Trump adviser Stephen Bannon. Drawing his title from the triple brackets used online by white supremacists to identify individuals who are Jewish (or whom they think are Jewish), New York Times editor Jonathan Weisman used the symbol in an act of reclamation and resistance against ascendant antisemitism. Drawing from his own experience, as well as analyzing the rise in hate crimes and speech against Jews both internationally and in the United St…
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…lood and body that is so common in the Christian world that one forgets to use the word “cannibalism.” For the Catholics if not the Protestants, the magical process of transubstantiation makes the wafers and wine truly become the Body and Blood of Christ, and the symbol becomes, on the tongue of the beholder, quite literal. But the remainders of truly ritualistic killings of the Palo Mayombe variety still linger on the fringe of the bounds of fait…
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…I want to say is that I don’t know where they come from, but I know I can use these desires to promote self-awareness. I know these desires could form a more powerful basis for something like faith-based counseling. I know these desires are new ideas, which is not easy in a field that’s been around for a while. I know if I start talking about culture, I won’t get off the issue. That part is very conscious, very deliberate in the book. On the othe…
Read More…thin religious circles. The controversy here is that religion is trying to use pseudo-psychological methods to convince gay and lesbian people that science supports their efforts to “pray away the gay.” They use studies from psychologists like Paul Cameron whose research has been discredited (he has been kicked out of the American Psychological Association). In fact, as Wayne Besen has pointed out in an op-ed in the Advocate, the entire foundation…
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…ink it’s good to be a distraction to your team. I don’t think it’s good to use the team as a platform. I totally disagree with that. Not his protest. But I just think there’s a right way to do things. I don’t think two wrongs make a right. Never have, never will. I think it just creates more divisiveness, more division. For Swinney, the right way to do things is in a manner that doesn’t feel divisive, such as a team press conference with the team’…
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…ion; watching out for his own.” This god demands justice and is willing to use violence to achieve His ends. For people like Rev. Jones, the same God who sanctioned mass killings in the Hebrew Scriptures is the same God who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah; who came to Earth in the form of Jesus and who (according to Matthew 10:34) came not to “bring peace, but a sword;” who will return as Jesus with a robe dipped in his enemy’s blood (Revelation 19:1…
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