Religion Dispatches
…ent, only recognized in them; these rights exist only because they were granted by God. That “endowed by the Creator” argument has been made repeatedly by Republican politicians in speeches lately, including Mike Huckabee, Michele Bachmann, and Newt Gingrich. That’s the new “values voters” rhetoric: government is a tyrant, disobedient to God. Sure, all the anti-gay, anti-abortion, and anti-secularism stuff is packed in there. But at its core — an…
Read More…Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Moore tackles California’s new law protecting the rights of transgender students, allowing them to freely use bathrooms or locker rooms they feel fits their gender identity. Moore emphasizes that Jesus tells us we are born “male and female” and the existence of transgender people “who feel alienated from their identities as men or as women” is simply the result of the “fallen” nature of our world—sin…
Read More…life. Each day now, and not just on my birthday, I try to learn something new. If not some profound thing, then at least to see with new eyes even something already and always there: signs of life’s continual unfolding. A new bud opening on the tree, an apple fallen from the weight of its own ripeness, the wind blowing this way instead of that. That’s why I have endeavored to have some kind of new experience of great proportion on my cyclical bir…
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…icultural self-education program that has involved trips to the deserts of New Mexico to hang out with farming monks, Portland(ia) to learn “Old World”-style butchery techniques, and have just departed the old sod of New Hampshire again, this time for farming stints in the hills of Turkey and along coastline of the Adriatic. My story bears little resemblance to struggle of the Immokalee workers or the army of poorly-paid farm hands who are the bul…
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…BT Inclusion Project,” was just published by Intersections International—a New York-based nonprofit whose mandate, says founding director Rev. Robert Chase, is to bring together people who differ, honor those differences, and find ways to work together for reconciliation, justice, and peace. The report builds on interviews with Muslim community leaders, several scholarly articles, as well as facilitated discussions among more than 50 people in six…
Read More…. It’s the possible swing group for both sides on this issue.” Even if the numbers are read as Catholics leaning against full marriage equality, the report still contains good news for gays and lesbians. An overwhelming majority of Catholics (69 percent) believe that sexual orientation is fixed and cannot be changed by “ex-gay” therapies. When asked if sexual activity between people of the same sex is sinful, 56 percent said no. That compares to 4…
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…but certainly it all has the potential to be at least good. Humans create new humans all the time. It’s how we nurture those new creations that matters. Here is where to spend our energy. I suppose you could argue, and it certainly has been argued, that ‘in the beginning’ God created everything as it is now, in which case when new things are created in this burgeoning field of Venter’s known as synthetic biology, you might be a bit miffed. But fa…
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…mmigrant from New Jersey,” she remarks that “one observation before I left New Jersey, was there were entire counties in New Jersey that seemed to have had huge increases in the Indian and Chinese population. I’d get on the New Jersey transit and it was very clear that when I commuted to New York in the 80s, the—the composition,” she pauses, choosing her word carefully, “of the train was much different than it was when I left in 2020. And it seeme…
Read More…w wrote, “only Mitt Romney has broad potential appeal.” Only Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul come close to Romney in name recognition, but more than 60% of voters say they would never vote for any of them. The Pew survey also shed new statistical light on a favorite subject of media and Republican handwringing: Romney’s Mormonism. A healthy majority of Americans (68%) say that it would not matter to them if a presidential candidate was M…
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…red, and Art declared its independence from Religion. This created a whole new way of seeing, a new and distinctively modern culture of display, and a subtly religious perspective where the line separating real bodies from visual imitations began to blur. We live in that world of hybrid forms still today. The body is a site of conflict as well as a source of uncanny cultural production. So the body parts of the paradigmatic “man of science” are…
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