Religion Dispatches
…ble assertion to make in such a tendentious book. Perhaps there is a small number of Americans losing their lives at the hands of hasty harvesters; even a very small number would be too high. But I had a hard time summoning any outrage. In the end I learned much more from Kagan—ironically because his aims are in a way more modest. He wants to convince you of his physicalist stance; however, he doesn’t want to tell you how to reconcile with death….
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…ed “to get rid of these people in the society.” Some observers believe the number of sexual minorities may have been inflated in order to whip up opposition to homosexuality which could advance the standing of conservative politicians. Graham Knight, a British blogger living in Ghana, recently wrote that the claim of 8,000 sexual minorities has little support in fact. Knight concluded, in a blog post titled Did Ghana register 8000 homosexuals? The…
Read More…data on the correlation between the number of pipers in a village and the number of butts in local church pews. Across the pond in the American colonies, religion was not faring much better. In his masterful reconstruction of American religious history, Awash in a Sea of Faith (from which the previous anecdote is drawn), Jon Butler reports that Christianity was “in crisis” in the New World: Pennsylvania aside, the Restoration colonies of New York…
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…iliar to Bulgarians because it is based on a “kukeri” mask, used to chase away evil spirits in a number of annual customs and rituals. This irked two of Bulgaria’s largest folklore groups, Gotse Delchev and the Bulgare ensemble, who wrote an open letter objecting to the use of traditional Bulgarian folk symbols in the Sofia Pride event. Eighteen embassies and a few representatives of international organizations had publicly supported the event. Th…
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…t the “Aerobics Center,” students filled out a computer card with their ID number, activity number, and the time, intensity, and distance of their workout. The data derived from the cards helped to determine grades. One student who had been forced to enroll in the Pounds Off Program said, “I’m really sad for the school. It has so much potential, so many positive things about it, but you can’t treat people this way… They treat you like you’re not c…
Read More…ssed to you?” or “Nudity DOES NOT liberate me and I DO NOT need saving.” A number of commenters in the group, in fact, seem to think that Femen members are the ones who are oppressed. I myself have experienced these events as something of a roller coaster ride. As someone temperamentally shy about my body, I was both horrified and impressed first by Amina’s courageous statement, and later by the Femen protesters. But I also feared for their bodil…
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…sippi Clarion Ledger reported earlier this year that the overall growth in number of interracial couples in Mississippi was behind the national average (less than 2.4 percentage points in Mississippi compared to 2.8 percentage points nationally). According to a report released by Pew Research Center in 2017, only 9% of Americans say that interracial marriage is “a bad thing,” while 17% of respondents to a 2018 YouGov poll said that interracial mar…
Read More…economy of the “religionization” of global politics, which I’ll mention by way of conclusion. Today many scholars and practitioners interested in these topics in Europe, North America, and elsewhere see no way forward but to take their place in the burgeoning international infrastructure of religion and development, religion and humanitarianism, religion and legal reform, interfaith understanding, religious rights protections, and so on. There is…
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…o connote a sense of fixity and stability, an impression that “this is the way marriage always was,” leaving “gay marriage” to represent a sharp and dramatic historical rupture. Yet this way of thinking is only possible because of a certain historical amnesia. In fact, it would be far more precise to characterize the historical “tradition” of Christian marriage as one of development and change. Many of these developments, furthermore, continue to…
Read More…e victims. Usually it’s their family trying to kill them, they’re running away, etc. This is the first time you can see open-minded, really educated people that speak at least three languages, Arab gay guys who are actually not so far from the Western [way of] life and can talk at the same eye level as Western people… I identify with almost 80 percent of the Arab world because there is at least 20 percent that I cannot even relate to. I’m talking…
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