Religion Dispatches
…nslated into a handful of European languages and Tongan. A few years ago, I spent a whole morning tuning into the various real-time translation streams on-line. As someone who has spent some time in the Navajo Southwest, I listened longest to Conference in the beautiful Dine Bizaad—Navajo language. Ya’a’teeh, brothers and sisters. Happy conference weekend. And welcome to 21st century Mormonism….
Read More…dates, while the other is primarily Hispanic, younger, concentrated in the Southwest and supports Democratic presidential candidates.” It’s this hardening of Catholic camps that may make it difficult for Francis to effect real change in areas like immigration reform and, particularly, climate change and global economic inequity. Eighty-one percent of non-white Catholics said the government should do more to address economic inequality, versus 65%…
Read More…alysis of the “volume of prayers being offered” is overlaid with data on a number of social problems, to compare the “prayer years with the post prayer years.” The removal of prayer from public schools lowered the amount of prayer being offered to such a degree that its impact was felt, not just in the schools, but in every aspect of our national life! Never mind that just because two things seem to happen at the same time doesn’t make them causal…
Read More
…cade earlier. I don’t pretend to have done a full-scale ethnography of the Southwest IAF network. How could one do that in a summer and a winter? Rather, the book is an exercise in public philosophy. It is meant to resemble classic works of traveling theory like Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and Martineau’s Society in America. I wanted to bring the philosophy of democratic citizenship down to earth. How has your thinking evolved about your ea…
Read More
…luential, and feared men—white or Native—in what would become the American Southwest. But few have ever heard of him. Wakara was a founding father of the states we now call Utah, California, and New Mexico. He also stole horses by the thousands from the California missions and enslaved hundreds of Paiute Indians, whom he sold at slave auctions in New Mexico and Utah. Wakara was a great and terrible man. But we know little about him. And what we kn…
Read More…put out the following statement from Bishop Minerva Carcaño of the Desert Southwest Conference: Though the Senate failed to supply the necessary leadership to provide humane and effective solutions to the badly broken immigration system, the DREAM Act students have shown themselves to be our leaders not only for tomorrow, but for today as well. These are students who desire nothing less than to serve their country – the only country many of them…
Read More
…on, with the lowest level of masking centered in the South, Southeast, and Southwest. You could overlay the non-compliant sections and the Bible-believing sections and you’d have a pretty good match. God will decide is the mantra of many of the folks who refuse to mask up. But what kind of God might this be? That’s my question. This may be a propitious moment to recall the work of Achille Mbembe, whose penetrating Necropolitics met with internatio…
Read More
…ve been present here since the 1800s. Moreover, lest we forget, the entire Southwest was once part of Mexico. By idealizing a heteronormative white Christian state, Trump is embracing a view of America that never existed, and is assuring a large swath of the country that it can avoid diversity and demographic change. In doing so, he is also denying the legal and symbolic citizenship of millions. While legal scholars—and many in Trump’s own party—a…
Read More…e aside from a short season of “wandering” (as he describes it) about “the Southwest from 1989 to 1991” he does not know it. And while it’s terrific to see opinion page coverage of Mormonism at the Times move beyond Maureen Dowd’s sneering recap of Bill Maher’s latest stand-up routine, it would also be terrific to see the nation’s paper of record solicit its Mormon content from some of the nation’s most knowledgeable interpreters of Mormon politic…
Read More
…heartland might express surprise that a SOGI ordinance could ever pass in southwest Missouri, much less in the city that hosts the headquarters of the Assemblies of God, a major conservative evangelical denomination. But Springfield has nearly 200,000 people, several universities, and a thriving LGBT community center. Opposition came from Christian Ministries Church, among other places, though CMC is not in the city limits of Springfield, it’s in…
Read More