Religion Dispatches
…ht be transferable to other types of available labor, and to “build on the best practices learned from Katrina and Rita.” A United Neighborhoods Approach Some of those best practices were honed at the Mary Queen Viet Nam church, where those helping to rebuild gathered, eating together from their own hands for months in the flood’s aftermath. They didn’t stop at bricks and mortar; community activism gave birth to organizations such as the Mary Quee…
Read More…or healing for parishioners, but realized his position perhaps was not the best one from which he could provide solace or healing given this particular situation. So he asked me and another colleague to intervene. It was a tough but rewarding experience, one I carry with me whenever I speak or write on this issue. So understand, when I criticize the church and its authorities harshly, it is because I feel the pain of those who suffered abuse, and…
Read More…those young people will experience. The booklet has been designated as a “Best Practice” resource for suicide prevention—the only one of its kind for LDS people—by the Suicide Prevention Resource Center and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. I spoke with Dr. Caitlin Ryan of the Family Acceptance Project at SFSU about the research and the reasoning behind this groundbreaking resource. I noticed that in the booklet you characterize hom…
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…adviser. Teenagers, you will be shocked to learn, do not always elect the best-qualified student council members. They are occasionally swayed by other concerns, like popularity. Rather than spend a lot of energy trying to convince teenagers to be more thoughtful about their elected representatives—not her place, and besides, there’s little chance of success—Dr. Tinker tries to get the best outcome possible for the very specific projects with whi…
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…at we have to “try on” alternative interpretations to see which offers the best fit with the whole of human experience—not merely with what we experience through our senses, but also with the broader and ultimately more important dimensions of our lived experience, including our moral and aesthetic experience and our sense of the numinous. Is a naturalistic worldview, one which explains away these latter features of our lives (or at least the last…
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…sex are threats to powerful men’s reputations. In such a circumstance, the best solution is sex-based segregation. But what Graham, Pence, and their ilk fail to understand is that neither women nor sexual desire are the problem; the problem is the abuse of male power. This is why women fear confronting powerful men, or simply men who have power over them. It’s easier to claim that sexual desire is inherently dangerous than to hold powerful men acc…
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…r the Banner of Heaven appeared the very next year, immediately becoming a bestseller. The book tells the story of the grisly murders of Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter, Erica, at the hands of her brothers-in-law, Ron and Dan Lafferty. Though excommunicated from the LDS church, Krakauer argues that the brothers were inspired by their religious heritage. The Laffertys were the natural culmination of 150 years of history centered on blind ob…
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…e; so subtle in fact that you might’ve missed it altogether. Despite their best efforts to depict themselves as speaking to and for Christians at large, neither Turning Point USA nor Donald Trump cares about more than a relatively small portion of the religion’s adherents. That distinction becomes extremely important in light of the growing sense among many expert observers that Trump’s rhetoric is increasingly authoritarian. Let’s face it: it’s p…
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…gation, the truth is that neither of these things is likely to happen. The best we can hope for is that more praiseworthy impulses within the Church will prevail—impulses to treat this crisis as a wake-up call, as a call to seriously introspect about the reasons why child sexual abuse is so rampant and the cover-ups so pervasive. We can hope that church leaders will begin to more seriously reflect on the dangers of caring more about the Church’s r…
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…s, and single-issue groups that make up a loose coalition that despite the best efforts of the Religion-Industrial Complex, cheerfully and successfully resists just about anything in the way of central coordination. Jenkins sees this as a distributed movement, and likes to point to areas where it’s played a crucial role in progressive successes in recent years. (Some of his most interesting reporting has been about Indigenous religious activism ar…
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