Religion Dispatches
…ergence of LGBT voices on campus at religious colleges. Look for all these stories—and some of the not-such-good-news we covered in 2012—to continue making waves in 2013. Civil Marriage and Uncivil Religion On New Year’s Day, same-sex couples in Maryland started getting legally married—joining those in Washington state and Maine, where voters had also given a thumbs-up in a remarkable set of November election victories. Pro-equality activists are…
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…alike. Pauline Park, one of the founders of a transgender group called the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, says that people often feel it’s one or the other—LGBTs vs. Christians. “In other words, if you’re for LGBT rights, you must be an atheist and have nothing whatsoever to do with organized religion, and you’re probably inclined to want to burn down the nearest church. Conversely, if you are a person of faith, that means you ar…
Read More…one of those mythologies won in spectacular fashion. Nic Pizzolatto constructed True Detective’s plot from a pair of sources, the first of which occurred in Ponchataoula, Louisiana, in 2005, when a former pastor told police that his church had turned from “Jesus to the devil.” He claimed they’d been holding Satanic rituals for years that involved animal sacrifice and the molestation of children. Or, as Jezebel put it in its headline, “Did a Horr…
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…e diversity, in terms of who’s creating the stories, who’s starring in the stories, who the stories are about. You can have a lot of brown people, but if the story’s really about white people, then it’s diversity, but not the kind we need. It doesn’t matter, at the end of the day, that you have more brown people. Nobody’s not watching a show because there’s not enough brown people on it. You mentioned, in No Land’s Man, how you got the job on The…
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…ierarchy of information and affect is so intractable that new information, new ideas, new encounters can’t reshape your affects. And in a lot of ways, I think what we’re seeing right now is a sort of a struggle going on between different affects, different affective strategies for responding to the situation. I do think that people can be confronted with new perspectives that give them an avenue to another affect. The other piece of viral content…
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…a community of Companions arose, taking pains to preserve this Revelation, word for word, as a template for human action in the world. The problem comes in with the way people—from fellow celebrity thinkers to professional opinion-mongers—react to Ramadan’s deeply held religious beliefs. Bernard-Henri Lévy calls Ramadan “the Genevan imam” and accuses him of hate speech in his criticisms of Israeli policy; Christopher Hitchens, infuriated with the…
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…” On the night of October 22, 1844, they huddled in a barn in Port Gibson, New York. They stood by the graves of their departed loved ones in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire. In Cincinnati, Ohio, 2,000 of them walked through downtown and climbed a hill to a park overlooking the city. Inside homes, on rooftops, in fields, alone or en masse, they waited for God. These were devotees of William Miller, the prosperous farmer turned self-taught biblical schol…
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…disavow, such complaints are difficult to take seriously. It is certainly true that sometimes generalizations about NAR—or anything else—can stray into broad-brushing, but USCAL’s public relations problems are mostly of their own making. They’re engaged in a complicity of silence regarding the far-right involvements, violent ideas, theocratic visions, and insurrectionist activities of many in their movement. They’re also disingenuous about their D…
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…that the Bible contains stories of false and true prophets, and that even true prophets sometimes deliver prophetic words which turn out to be false. Lance Wallnau (best known as a theorist of the Seven Mountains of Dominion) essentially blamed Christians for Trump’s defeat, explaining that while God had wanted a second term for Trump, it was Christians who had simply failed to back him up! Prophet R. Loren Sandford was among those who apologized,…
Read More…agery to affirm and elevate a leader who had admittedly broken the sacred trust between pastor and congregant.” Very true. Eddie Long’s continued pandering to keep the remnants of his deluded flock intact has no bounds. In fact, Long is King of his Lithonia Campus, subject to no authority. There is no church hierarchy to sit him down, no one to tell him that he is theologically incorrect. I hope that the full story of what he did to the young men…
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