Religion Dispatches
…eckoning, 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 churc…
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…ble for them and contrary their nature and morals.” Tahtawi’s sentiments reflect the growing alignment of Muslim reformers with the thinking of people like C.S. Sonnini and other Europeans who saw the Islamic world’s tolerance of sexual diversity as a sign of its backwardness. Today, vocal Muslim critics of LGBTQ+ rights often accuse gay and queer people of imposing a “Western” concept or forcing Islam to adjust to “Western values” failing to gras…
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…nam could have a positive impact on the country’s LGBT rights movement. “I will show up with the family that looks like mine,” he told the Blade. “My husband’s African American; our son is brown, he’s Latino. I’m white. We have this modern family. My mom’s coming with us. She’s 84. It’s a multigenerational, multiethnic family.” Osius said he has not seen any negative reaction to his confirmation within Vietnam — a picture of him with Clay and thei…
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…n the 1970s, Tim LaHaye in the 1990s and into the 2000s. Then, you have growing numbers of self-proclaimed evangelicals completely rejecting the apocalypticism that had for so long given their movement its distinctive identity. The story of postwar evangelicals is this tension between the more respectable, more careful, more savvy, leaders and those who preached a radical populist apocalypticism that harkened back to the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. A…
Read More…s his grim vision of Europe’s future: fields will lie fallow and economies will wither. A great depression will sink over the continent as it undergoes “a decline that Europe hasn’t experienced since the Black Death.” The comeuppance has a name, one being fervently hawked among a group of Christian-right “pro-family” activists hoping to spark a movement in secular Europe. It’s called the “demographic winter,” a more austere brand of apocalypse tha…
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…last century, there is every indication to believe that Moon’s political influence will last well into the future. Now celebrating his 90th birthday, Moon* has designated his son, the Rev. Hyung Jin Moon, to carry on his work. In addition to owning a number of media outlets including the reliably conservative Washington Times, the Moon family runs one of the biggest sushi-providing enterprises in the world. Moon has also put his stamp on a bevy of…
Read More…z. 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 evangelical identity of Trump’s supporters. Even by the strictest definition, plenty of “real” evangelicals are in Trump’s corner. It’s also worth noting that evangelicals using church attendance as the measure of tr…
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…Muslims. Last year’s hit Canadian show Little Mosque on the Prairie, along with Aliens in America in the United States, are among the few shows to present some of the ordinariness of North American Muslim life. Until Muslims become more involved in television and film, we will leave the telling of our own stories to others. As such, while we can and should protest against inaccurate descriptions, we also cannot expect others to tell our stories in…
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…n and families, including LGBT people and same-sex couples, if doing so conflicts with their religious belief; it permits state officials to decline to marry couples of whose marriage they disapprove; and it likewise permits medical professionals to decline to serve LGBT clients. Now, federal and state laws that create a distinction based on race are subject to the highest level of interrogation under the Constitution, called “strict scrutiny.” An…
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…of late saying that civil unions can be entered into by siblings, friends without benefits as it were, and others who might wish to avail themselves of legal protections which in some countries are still only for the heterosexually married. I hasten to remind them that before same-sex marriage was available in the thirty countries where it’s now legalized, many of those countries offered (and some still offer) civil unions. Statistics are hard to…
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