Religion Dispatches
…mber of flashbacks from when I was a young boy). In addition, there were a number of things I didn’t get the chance to explore for a very practical reason: I had a deadline. Working in publishing I’m very conscious about how important deadlines are. Writers need to make those deadlines and because I worked in the industry I wanted to be respectful about that. There were a number of frightening episodes that my wife experienced that I didn’t have t…
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…atheist websites then addressed. RationalWiki, an atheist wiki featuring a newsfeed and articles like “Atheism FAQ for the Newly Deconverted,” contained no mention of the Sikh shooting, but it did list an instance where a Florida door-to-door salesman was shot, and noted the recent mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado. PZ Myers, who is among the most visible atheist bloggers in the world, did write about the shooting twice, though one of his posts si…
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…Midwifery care was always tied to abortion care. This connection is not a new thing. The current political environment in the U.S. silos abortion from anything else.” For Prentice, birth advocates who explicitly place childbirth care along the spectrum of reproductive care are using a framework that doesn’t make sense. “This idea that we should be in bed with people who are pro-choice because we’re allowing women to choose where to give birth—it…
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…s that have led to the current situation that has killed or maimed a small number of Israelis and a huge number of Palestinians? The first step is for the world to demand an immediate cease-fire. That cease-fire should be imposed by the United Nations and backed unequivocally by the United States. Its terms must include the following: A. Hamas stops all firing of missiles, bombs, or any other violent action originating from the West Bank or Gaza,…
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…rming a large part of it. The extent of slavery in New Netherland (renamed New York and New Jersey after 1664) shocked many when historians brought it to light beginning in the 1970s. And then there are those doughty Afrikaner cousins of ours, whose rigidly racist apartheid ideology was forged by people calling themselves voortrekkers—pioneers—driven to form a separate and righteous society out in the veld. Like the Afrikaners, and like the Englis…
Read More…r convinced that it means they’re low-status males; There is a non-trivial number of human beings who are unrepentant daughters and/or fallopian tube havers and/or cardigan wearers; There was a Republican president in recent memory who had two daughters; There are social conservatives in other quarters trying to be seen as the ones who care about the value of daughters. One can only assume that NRO folks ran these scenarios and determined none of…
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…know lives. Cultivating Good Death imagination We must begin to cultivate new imagination for deathcare practices in the midst of this global pandemic that will rupture our every notion of the Good Death. There are a number of practitioners who will inform this collective imagination in the coming days: imams, rabbis, pastors, and priests, hospital chaplains and funeral directors, home funeral guides and death midwives. But―and this needs emphasi…
Read More…1,409 marriages, 56 percent were to female couples. According to Gay Star News, about 120,000 people are in civil partnerships, which they will be able to convert to marriages beginning in December. Costa Rica: Survey Shows Split on Religion and Sexuality According to The Costa Rica News, the Ecumenical School of Religious Studies at the National University released the findings of a telephone survey and set of focus groups on the religious belie…
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…liated. I’m beginning to wonder if the hold of traditional religion on the American imagination in general and the news media in particular is so great that it is impossible for us not to imagine those without a formal, institutional religious identification or affiliation as necessarily being unbelievers. Certainly, we can see the sensationalism of the original RNS headline as it made its rounds as expressing some level of anxiety that this is th…
Read More…the span of a decade. Per annum, it is 0.001%. If we take a more realistic number of 4 million American Muslims, the numbers become 0.005% over a decade, or 0.0005% per year. Last year there were 14,000 homicides in the U.S., and with a population of 300,000,000, that’s about 0.0005% of the population are murderers. The report ends with this sage advice: “This study’s findings challenge Americans to be vigilant against the threat of homegrown terr…
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