Religion Dispatches
…Methodist Bishop Nolan Harmon justify enslavement to his Methodist Polity class by saying that “somebody had to do the work.” (The economic structure of the South depended on farming and 19th-century farming required vast human labor.) Nolan Harmon was a signatory of the infamous letter from eight Southern white clergy saying Birmingham demonstrations were “unwise and untimely,” which prompted Martin Luther King Jr. to write his “Letter from a Bi…
Read More…ut McDonnell’s use of sources would be inadequate even in an undergraduate class. For example, he cites statistical evidence as the basis for his arguments, but checking his references we find that his source is not a scholarly report but an un-footnoted reference by a Christian Reconstructionist pastor, Ray Sutton, in a little book written for Gary North’s “Biblical Blueprint” series. The book is written at a level appropriate for a church Bible…
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…before groups ranging from his Church’s most wealthy elites to the middle-class Knights of Columbus, urging them to reconsider their position on immigration reform. His strategy: to proclaim (as summarized by the Catholic News Agency) “Immigration helps recover the Christian Origins of America.” Really? Is the Archbishop of Los Angeles suggesting that immigrants will bring about some sort of Christian Establishment in the United States? Is he…
Read More…e who claimed that at her public school she was made to feel like a second-class citizen for being straight. It seemed like a ludicrous assertion, so I asked filmmaker Joe Fox who told me that those teens were brought out to read their scripted statements, then declared off limits for follow-up questions. Question 1 also makes it clear that religion was a motivator for many people on the pro-equality side as well, documenting campaign events organ…
Read More…assed. To them, passing the bill was about helping the poor and the middle class, and they even enlisted Obama to perform on a conference call to prove how much his faith informed his action. See how this will never be good enough for the conservatives? If they don’t like the health care law at all, then Obama talking about how there’s a moral imperative to have health care reform won’t make them think he’s faithy. Nor will talking about Jesus. Th…
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…Then J. W. Wright and Everett Rowson’s edited collection Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature (1997) showed how much literature in Arabic addressed questions of same-sex attraction, if only researchers would open their eyes to it. Yehuda Schofer and Arno Schmitt also contributed to this dialogue. What was missing was a more intimate engagement with the religious tradition of Islam. This came with feminist Muslim scholars. They provided th…
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…Struggling, admittedly. Focused on what sometimes feels like minor middle-class or neo-liberal concerns like marriage, but it lives on. These are victories, of course. And yet, every year, we’re not sure if the anniversary is something to celebrate, commemorate, or mourn. We’re still here, still queer. And yet too many are not. The 30th wedding anniversary calls for pearls, various websites say. And yet, we have no weddings really, from the feder…
Read More…—most of which has to do with the way that Egyptian society is split along class lines and geographical lines, and the failure of the “no” vote to engage beyond their comfort zone and build a coalition. Religion did play a role, though less as a spiritual imperative than as an identity politics movement. The Coptic Church let it be known that they supported a “no” vote on the basis that if a new constitution were arrived at later on, with a parlia…
Read More…fore Thea Spyer died. Edie Windsor complained that DOMA makes her a second class citizen and criticized Boehner for seeking to keep her one: “I am very disappointed that the House of Representatives has decided to intervene in my case in order to try to prevent me from obtaining a refund of the $363,000 in estate taxes that I should never have had to pay in the first place.” The Human Rights Campaign agreed: “Not only are House Republican leaders…
Read More…example of their promotion of intelligent design in public school science class, see their 1999 booklet Intelligent Design in Public School Science Curricula: A Legal Guidebook. Also, in the case of Dover, Discovery initially sent pro-ID DVDs, such as Signature in the Cell, to school board members. But when it looked like the case was headed for a First Amendment trial that they would inevitably lose, they dropped back to urging board members to…
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