Religion Dispatches
…g, then one can see their fruits in Germany today. Last month, following a number of horrid, hateful slogans chanted at Jews (in the context of otherwise legitimate protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza), and a number of violent incidents, there was a large public vigil in Berlin to protest anti-Semitism. Among the attendees were German President Joachim Guack, members of Germany’s parliament, leaders of both of the country’s major churches, an…
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…punished.” The nuance between affected and natural expression of gender reflects the historical reality: gender non-conforming people have been part of Islamic history from the very beginning. Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani’s Kitab al-Aghani records the lives of a number of individuals including one named Tuways who lived during the last years of Muhammad and the reigns of the early Muslim dynasties. Tuways was mukhannathun: those who were born as men,…
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…mation of marriage. “For on earth marriage binds us across the ages in the flesh, across families in the flesh, and across the fearful and wonderful divide of man and woman, in the flesh. This is not ours to alter,” it reads. “It is ours, however, to encourage and celebrate….This we affirm.” But in practice, it ended with something more significant—a strengthening of alliances. The event forged and deepened relationships across faith lines. “This…
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…vil Rights movement as an example of people who break the law. Whiteness influenced these evangelical theologians, and when we compare them with African American theologians we can see how their sensitivities influenced the way they read, understood, and applied the Bible. How does apocalypticism shape someone like Billy Graham and, by extension, modern evangelicalism? Billy Graham gets a pass from a lot of scholars who pay very little attenion to…
Read More…to “be fruitful and multiply,” Europeans have failed to produce the magic number of 2.1 children per couple, the estimated “replacement-level fertility” for developed nations (and a figure repeated so frequently it becomes a near incantation). The white Christian West, in this telling, is in danger of forfeiting itself through sheer lack of numbers to an onslaught of Muslim immigrants and their purportedly numerous offspring. In other words, Mosh…
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…chard Dawkins is arguably the most famous living atheist, now that Anthony Flew doubted his doubts and backslid,” said Comfort, co-host, along with actor Kirk Cameron, of the TV show The Way of the Master. “Flew said that he simply followed the evidence. I would like to see Richard Dawkins follow his example.” Election Detritus: The Conservative Hollywood 16: What do Dan Aykroyd, Pat Boone, Dean Caine, Jon Cryer, Clint Eastwood, Joe Flanigan, Kels…
Read More…e larger point: Trump is still the one candidate who coalesces the largest number of evangelicals—even the weekly churchgoers—around him. Those numbers would likely shift should Trump face a two-man race with Ted Cruz. But if survey data still show what they have revealed so far—that Trump will continue to win at least a third of the most frequent church-attending evangelicals—it undermines anti-Trump evangelicals’ main argument about the suspect…
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…ght into Sunni Islam. And in 1978, I came to admire the character of Venus Flytrap (played by Tim Reid) on WKRP in Cincinnati. On one episode in the final season (1982), a detective who was about to arrest Venus asked him if he was a Muslim. Since the time of my youth, while the Muslim population in North America has increased tremendously, the number of Muslim characters on television has remained negligible. The few that exist are of alien, viol…
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…sippi Clarion Ledger reported earlier this year that the overall growth in number of interracial couples in Mississippi was behind the national average (less than 2.4 percentage points in Mississippi compared to 2.8 percentage points nationally). According to a report released by Pew Research Center in 2017, only 9% of Americans say that interracial marriage is “a bad thing,” while 17% of respondents to a 2018 YouGov poll said that interracial mar…
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…nsive footage filmed around the world, a viewer can count on two hands the number of women, including two heads of state, who have any semblance of agency and are real actors in cooperation with Francis. Instead, his bishops, secretaries, interreligious colleagues, escorts, and welcomers are all men all the time. It may seem churlish to point out this dynamic in light of Francis’ many good works. But it’s a telltale sign of an institution that nee…
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