Religion Dispatches
…st to admit that the US is far from perfect, and I am ready to criticize many of its policies. I suppose that it is precisely this readiness, this desire many of us have to show that we are open-minded and fair, that represents one key psychological source of the temptation to engage in false equivalence. The fact remains, however, that the distortions resulting from false equivalence can be just as damaging in international comparisons as in dome…
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…eat scrolls and insist the parchment tastes just like the honey of that many-mansioned heaven in the by-and-by sky. Krieger shows us the bodily as both central to and taboo within that tradition. Something two-faced lurks, these poems suggest, in the way we cry out the word God when we writhe like the damned in hot pits, or how we think of transcending death through the petites morts we tremor through. Our bodies offer both rough bondage and temp…
Read More…even have the courtesy to check Trayvon’s phone for his mom and dad’s telephone numbers because it’s just a black criminal’s body to them. While Zimmerman the trigger man slept in his bed, the police ordered a drug and alcohol test for Trayvon’s lifeless body. A black body that was representative of evil against the whiteness of George Zimmerman. I hesitated to write about this story, because there are many good stories about Trayvon and his pare…
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…s and killings of LGBT people. Uganda: Plight of LGBT refugees examined Tonny Onyulo reported for PRI on the situation of LGBT Ugandans who have sought asylum in Kenya. Homosexuality is also illegal in Kenya, Onyulo notes, “but enforcement of the law has been more sporadic than in Uganda.” Iraq: Activist says anti-LGBT violence sparked by western intervention Amrou Al-Kadhi, an Iraqi living in the United Kingdom, wrote a column this month saying t…
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…fied as AIDS, did not receive ongoing or thorough coverage. By 1982, nearly 800 AIDS cases had been diagnosed. According to one study, infants and children were increasingly infected. Although a threat to the general population was quickly dismissed, the implication was clear: anyone could be infected. The epidemic had exposed social and cultural fault lines that made coverage more than just a medical story. Its initial outbreak in the homosexual…
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…most Catholic health care institutions have accepted the accommodation, a number of the nation’s 260 Catholic institutions of higher learning as well as Catholic nonprofits are seeking a broader exemption that would in effect bar their insurers from providing contraceptive coverage as specified under the accommodation designed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a consolidated case challenging th…
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…and nuns, Christian and otherwise, live in monasteries and convents; and a number of historic Protestant churches, especially those best endowed financially, provide parsonages. But over time, an increasing number of clergy have made their own living arrangements. Churches found parsonages prohibitively expensive; congregants preferred to see their donations go toward services rather than clergy housing; and new religious ventures, especially the…
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…of the “principalities and powers” that now dominate our landscape. Is it any wonder that according to a recent Pew Research poll, millenials today have fewer attachments to traditional political or religious institutions than any other generation in the last quarter century? With no movement like the Social Gospel to develop the ideas that could carry us into a new millennium and inspire young people with the idealism that the people, working thr…
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…1 of Mexico’s 800 deacons served the Diocese of San Cristobal, the largest number of deacons in any Catholic diocese in the world. Vatican suspicion of Bishop Ruiz’s liberationist pastoral strategy resulted in a failed attempt to remove him in 1993. The deacon program came under particular scrutiny after the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, with reports that Maya catechists defied the bishop and enlisted in the indigenous rebel army. In an effo…
Read More…ing to sway them one way or the other, since they were likely Paul voters anyway. And as a Louisville reader at Talking Points Memo writes in, Conway faced a barrage of oppositional advertising which probably had more of an impact on his declining poll numbers than Aqua Buddha since, of course, most people aren’t analyzing it as closely as pundits and political writers do. But the question remains — as it has since around 2006, when the Democrats…
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