Religion Dispatches
…tie together all that education, plus a PhD in American Civ at Brown, plus years of teaching, to the reality of lived experience, to make a new narrative if you will. I once hoped to get it published by 1998 in time for the 30th anniversary of that great year, but the trade publishers found it too academic and the academic publishers found it too trade. I despaired several times that I would never climb out of that great canyon between them. But I…
Read More…boards as she drives them to events in the city. She offers daycare to a 2-year-old, 4-year-old and 8-year-old. “When I’m driving them to the Schenectady Public Library and they say, ‘What does gay mean?’ how do I answer that question?” she said. “How do I expose them to such content?” My suggestion would be to tell the little shavers: “Gay people are two people of the same sex who love each other very much and commit themselves to live together f…
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…pays special attention to the match’s honorary coin-tosser, a blond, seven-year-old boy who “contracted liver cancer at age two and somehow survived after surgery and horrific chemo.” When Wallace first brings him up you think it’s as part of the essay’s scene-setting, but by the time Wallace returns to the boy in his final footnote you realize that the essay is much about the meaning of his body as it as about Federer’s. The awful ways our bodies…
Read More…all people is sorely needed. Sadly, the gender equality bill released last year didn’t quite deliver its promised equality. China: Man challenges ‘cure therapy’ he was subjected to A 32-year-old man is suing a mental hospital that held him against his will and subjected him to therapies designed to “cure” his homosexuality. Myanmar: Interview with an LGBT equality advocate Myanmar Now published an interview with Shinn Thant, program officer for Co…
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…n a very uneasy balance, one easily upset, as the political events of this year, and each of the forty-three years since 1967 has demonstrated. Jerusalem’s great symbolic value for Muslims, Christians, and Jews has long overshadowed the lives of its citizens, and has rendered impossible any prospects of improving the situation. The official Israeli presentation of life in post-1967 Jerusalem may be glimpsed in the “Jerusalem” entry in the Encyclop…
Read More…the women’s rights movement has been pushing for change for more than 120 years. Most of the advances for LGBT people have come in the past decade. “That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to take another 100 years. But it does mean the battle isn’t over, and in some countries it’s barely begun,” Radcliffe told The Huffington Post this week. “A lot of work lies ahead to challenge oppressive laws, demand proper legal protections and to change peo…
Read More…nt study found very low levels of guilt or regret post-abortion. The three-year study of 670 women who had an abortion found that 95% didn’t regret their decision and after three years most women “rarely” thought about it. So with the exception of regular church-going Catholic women racked with guilt over an abortion they had despite knowing it was morally wrong who didn’t realize they could ask for forgiveness, the pope’s announcement may have li…
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…their trials. Plowshares’ prison sentences usually fall in the one- to two-year range, though they also have been far longer. In an anomalous case in 1985, eighteen-year sentences were handed down to activists who used, instead of household hammers, a jackhammer on a missile silo cover — which, they argued, even had it not malfunctioned and stopped working almost immediately, was every bit as ineffective against the covers as household hammers wou…
Read More…of Barber’s and was a master of ceremonies at the rally. HRC’s Groves said years of coalition-building in the state have paid off, saying she had never seen a more diverse gathering. “Rather than fighting for a piece of the pie, progressive groups came together to call for a better North Carolina for all its people.” Even though the context of the march was a year of devastating attacks on voting rights, public education, and access to health care…
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…Moore’s famous poem, which appeared alongside Thomas Nast’s illustrations year after year in 19th-century editions of Harper’s. For the rest of it, we have to thank none other than the Coca-Cola company, which paid to print pictures of Santa in color so long as the colors were ones that would look good with a can of their product. Hook reveled in unmasking “this huge, shamanic, psuedo-shamanic totem” that managed to insert itself into the high ho…
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