Religion Dispatches
…Plan” campaign. Alston said he hopes to organize 500 community screenings between now and the film’s official release in the fall. Robinson says he has found that nothing works better to change hearts and minds than LGBT people telling their own stories—or allies telling the story of someone they love, such as a child, aunt or uncle, or friend. He recalls making a too-flippant comment at some event asking how straight white men could “get it” in…
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…under the First Amendment. We think it’s time for us all to seek religious freedom for reproductive freedom, and to recognize that persistent efforts to interfere in reproductive decisions is “an infringement of a natural right” in the sense the Virginia Statute warned. Of course, women didn’t share in this natural right at the time—but the right to believe differently than the rich and the powerful as codified in the Statute and the First Amendme…
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…nto two giant PDF files and put them on the internet. For just anyone. For free. A few hours later, a fully-searchable edition of the CHI started to make the digital rounds. And by Friday, much to our astonishment, the LDS Church published the entire second volume on its own website. (The first volume remains officially restricted to lay clerical leaders.) The buzz among bloggers and web-journalists quickly converged around changes to the section…
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…ion has deadened entrails of compassion, smothered prophetic voices, and caused amnesia. As in all religious traditions, memory can inform the present. Pentecostal and Baptist churches in the Southwest and Midwest were impacted severely by the mass repatriation of the 1930s, when nearly one out of every three Mexicans and Mexican Americans was forced out of the country. U.S. citizens were leveraged out of the country because of strong family ties….
Read More…sh anti-gay law that would criminalizeeven the dissemination of ideas that promote LGBT equality. Radio Free Europe reports: Kyrgyzstan’s parliament has approved a draft law that bans “propaganda of same-sex relations” in the first reading. Lawmaker Kurmanbek Dyikanbaev told RFE/RL on October 15 that 79 deputies voted for the legislation, while seven voted against it. The law has to pass the parliament’s approval in two more readings and then be s…
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…e good news of Christianity for me. It’s not that you can be happy and whole, but rather that life is crap and you don’t know the answers. It’s good news to be freed from the oppression that there’s something that’s going to make it all better. When you’re free from that and begin to work through your brokenness and suffering with a set of rituals, practices and sacraments that help us encounter our humanity, I think we become more loving, more be…
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…the first to do worse than its parents’ misses. What we are supposed to do better is politics, not markets). The real question of the day, for Whitman, was what edifice should be built upon such a massive constitutional and economic platform; how that question would be answered marked the real test for the future of the American experiment in democratic pluralism. Here is Whitman again: The Third stage, rising out of the previous ones, to make…
Read More…y quotes Funda Soldaat, who runs a shoe-string support organization called Free Gender: “Even if you know how the constitution works, you don’t know how to use it to protect yourself. If you don’t have money you don’t have access to the justice system. Violence in the townships is normal. Homosexuality is [seen as] un-African. Patriarchy is everywhere. The way religious leaders read scripture is painful. Children start raping at 14, 15 and take pi…
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…nsurance is per se redistributive. You’re taking money from people whose houses don’t burn down to give it to the people whose houses do burn down. There’s more than a little irony in this given how proud the Catholic Church is of its role advocating for universal health insurance coverage since the early twentieth century. The Catholic Church helped educate the country about the need for shared social benefit programs, then helped tear down the v…
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…rnative methods are deployed? Not clear. And that’s a problem. This is because the words we use, the way we view our subject, here “the Jew,” the focus on bodies, and on survival in the sense of making more bodies, has a price, and that price is that one must inadvertently racialize the Jew. But those scholars are not yet willing, it seems, to recognize the methods used to explore that racialization, in part because today the regnant view is that…
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