Religion Dispatches
…near the bottom on various national scales, and California’s once-vaunted high-quality, low-cost public higher education system has been almost entirely trashed. This chart (courtesy of Prof. Manuel Pastor, director of USC’s peerless Program for Environmental and Regional Equity) shows how non-Hispanic whites from throughout the entire United States will soon be following those from the Golden State into minority status; it may take another 30 y…
Read More…est, local authorities rejected a gay commencement speaker at one Catholic high school graduation and tried to prevent a gay-friendly foundation from awarding a scholarship at another. And Two Jesuit universities resisted pressure to retract invitations to Desmond Tutu and Kathleen Sibelius respectively, also over questions of sexual orthodoxy. The problem with paying all this attention to the Catholic culture wars is that a person risks missing o…
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…s propped the Church up in the past forty years. Hispanic Catholics have a high fertility rate (2.75 children per couple), second only to Muslims in the U.S. Non-Hispanic Catholics (2.11 children), meanwhile, look a lot like moderate Protestants (2.01) and liberal Protestants (1.84). Here’s the kicker: Catholics are overrepresented among immigrants—again, especially Hispanics—who still account for a disproportionate number of all births in the U.S…
Read More…century by American Protestant “Restorationists:” people who believed that high-church Protestant sectarian schism and theological technicalities had obscured the original power of primitive Christianity and who sought to restore that original power to daily life and practice. Mormonism has turned out to be the most powerfully innovative of the Restorationist Protestant movements (which also include churches like the Disciples of Christ), generati…
Read More…ned that this may deal a blow to family, religion and education. This is a highly controversial and sensitive issue in Hong Kong which must be tackled cautiously.” Botswana: LGBT Group Fights for Legal Recognition Monica Tabengwa writes this week for Human Rights Watch about an LGBT advocacy organization that has been fighting for official recognition from the government for a decade: It’s not illegal to be gay in Botswana, but sometimes it must f…
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…—Robertson as central to the Republican coalition—I rank it separately and higher because anti-Robertsonite conservatives in the Republican Coalition at least have some alibi in relation to Robertson’s 1988 campaign—they beat him back and have engaged in related tugs of war ever since. However, I see no such alibi for looking the other way as Robertson made anti-Semitic smears (plus similar attacks on New Agers, feminists, Muslims, and others) and…
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…stian nationalism have been a part of evangelicalism from its beginning? A number of recent studies, for instance, have shown that the Moral Majority’s founding was prompted as much by federal interventions into the racist admission policies of evangelical colleges as it was by more moral concerns like abortion. Other scholars, meanwhile, have highlighted race’s centrality to American church history, noting that the evangelical involvement in the…
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…have long been supportive of pain-management measures, up to and including high doses of morphine that slow a patient’s respiration to the point of death, said Courtney Campbell, a professor of religion and culture at Oregon State University, and an expert on faith and end-of-life issues. The Catholic position on physician-assisted death contradicts its support of such pain management, known as palliative sedation, he said. “If the religious tradi…
Read More…Syria, being “out” in Lebanon isn’t an option, either. Lebanon now has the highest proportion of refugees in the world, with Syrian refugees making up a quarter of the country’s population. “We know hundreds, thousands of LGBT refugees are coming across, but if we start counting, it could be used against them and us. It’s better they slip unnoticed into Lebanon. Prejudice against gay men and women doesn’t stop at the border. The trouble is, they a…
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…he massive Miracle Center Cathedral, the biggest megachurch in Uganda, the high-living pastor is quite frank that “American money helped us build this church,” adding, “whatever you see here is the fruit of American labor.” In another clip, a pastor marvels that aid from U.S. evangelicals increased threefold when they started attacking homosexuality. Churches’ financial success brings added clout to anti-gay pastors like Martin Ssempa—who drives h…
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