Religion Dispatches
…e first amendment and what we mean when we talk about “religion.” Here’s a month-by-month break down of 2014’s Satanic controversies. JANUARY In an interview for Religion Dispatches, Greaves explained that his goal is not to promote Satanic worship but to demonstrate why the establishment clause must be applied consistently. He stated that although he does not believe in a supernatural Satan, his group is a religion because it has shared set of va…
Read More…ifficulties in the Salt Lake / Provo areas—reaction is filtering back from Mormon viewers of the film. LDS Church spokespeople have dismissed the film as blatantly false. But what I’m hearing from a number of Mormons deeply familiar with the Proposition 8 campaign is that the film gets it mostly right. [See also Holly Welker’s review here. – Eds] Some take exception to editing choices that sequence events out of context for dramatic effect; ot…
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…class.” While the United States has now broken faith with the Sinai sharing model, he says the “tragedy is terminal only if hope, the most revolutionary of emotions, also dies.”…
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…teetering on the edge of bankruptcy when the scandal broke. But there was more to it than just big hair and money. Before PTL could become a front-page scandal it had to have an outsized presence in American culture. That largely happened through innovation, including the Christian television talk show format, which Bakker pioneered with Pat Robertson at the Christian Broadcasting Network in the 1960s, PTL’s private satellite network, launched in…
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…series of disputes concerning both church governance and theology, chief among them contention over the pope’s claim to universal authority. A number of violent incidents over two hundred years, from both sides of Christianity’s two halves, helped solidify the separation. These included the Byzantine massacre of Catholics living in Constantinople in 1182, the sacking of Thessaloniki by Catholics in 1185, and their pillage of Constantinople in 120…
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…uments. If it weren’t for those preachers, he says, America today would be more like France, following the European model of “collective rights, collective issues, collective everything.” In the Tea Party era, ‘collective’ is a four-letter word. Beck and Barton don’t even like the terms “human rights” or “social justice” because they see them as collectivist. In a televised conversation in April, Barton dismissed social justice, saying “That’s col…
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…involved are, it ultimately makes the job of getting a criminal conviction more difficult,” she says. Furthermore, such practices may be illegal. Reporting laws related to sexual abuse differ by state. But there are few, if any, conditions under which an adult is not bound to report child sexual abuse to the authorities. In New Jersey, any adult with reasonable suspicion of child abuse must report their suspicion to the authorities, says Ford. How…
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…ce after an enraged mob stormed his house, beating him and threatening his mother, a Coptic Christian. Saber was rumored to be circulating the Innocence of Muslims film trailer on his Facebook page. In a video blog, he spoke of the importance of exercising critical reasoning about religious matters. While in custody, Saber was slashed in the throat by razor-wielding prisoners after a guard told them of his “crime” and he was compelled to give fal…
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…ed by businesses like Annex challenge the ACA’s contraception mandate on a number of grounds. The most significant challenge invokes the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, claiming that the insurance coverage mandate imposes a substantial burden on the free exercise of religion. Annex Medical lost its claim because the court concluded that the mandate does not impose a substantial burden on religious exercise and in the widely-publicized H…
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…as it is antagonistic. The acknowledgment that Black lives matter must be more than a moment in history, not a marketing ploy or an opportunity for fraudulent inclusivity via corporate statements. Keep that. The dismantling of white supremacy has to extend far beyond “Blackout Tuesday” or it will never work. So what does genuine change look like? Truthfully, no Black person should ever be expected to describe in totality the ways in which they wi…
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