Religion Dispatches
…ject to a great deal of debate. But I think we should all agree that these numbers are not only grim, but after 15 years, they are intolerable. For if we believe that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, then we cannot accept the ongoing marginalization of half the world’s population. We cannot accept it morally, politically, socially, or economically. But speaking to a room of the world’s most powerful people who h…
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…erals and gain control of national structures of public life through sheer numbers. In the process, children and women have something of their full humanity (the manner in which they reflect the image of God, if you will) damaged if not destroyed. An effort to understand children (having and raising them) through literal appeal to Scripture, without any attention to the historical and cultural context of the Bible, promises problems. It isn’t clea…
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…ality is a project long in the making. While change is usually measured in numbers (female members of Congress, the value of a woman’s dollar), the long view of intellectual and political history matters even more. Taking the long view means putting history to work and to minding the gaps; the blank spaces in popular knowledge and analysis. Coline Jenkins, great-great granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, is one activist gap-minder. She will sp…
Read More…atheists and agnostics growing among the unaffiliated, and with decreasing numbers of white evangelicals making up younger voters, wouldn’t that mean the unaffiliated will start to dominate our politics? It’s too early to know this, of course; while white Catholics and white mainline Protestants have lost adherents, PRRI found, white evangelicals have retained steady membership, despite losses. (PRRI calls this “churn,” meaning that some people di…
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…it existence. They were murdered. Armenians were among the murdered. Great numbers were killed, on purpose. There was an Armenian genocide. In 1913, the Committee of Union and Progress, a xenophobic, nationalistic and militaristic junta (in stark contrast to the historically more pluralistic traditions of Ottoman governance), seized the Ottoman Empire and attempted to rebuild it in the image of secular European nationalism. In 1915, a few months a…
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…erica roughly ten years after “seceding” Dutch Calvinists first arrived in numbers to settle in Western Michigan, Northwestern Iowa, and a few other chilly enclaves. These “seceders” were unhappy that the Dutch government at the time (1840s) was doing away with some relics of the old Calvinist theocracy in the Netherlands—e.g., ending discrimination against Catholics and Jews (we can’t have that, can we?). In essence the Christian Reformed Church…
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…0s. In 1978, fewer than 3 percent of clergy were women, but by 2017, their numbers had grown to approximately one-third of ordained clergy in the mainline denominations. Despite these gains, women clergy still remained less likely to serve as lead or senior pastors than their male counterparts. My 2005 book, Women With a Mission: Religion, Gender, and the Politics of Women Clergy (co-authored with Sue E.S. Crawford and Laura R. Olson), examined th…
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Women tend to vote in higher numbers than men, so women—and especially Catholic women whose cohort is considered important to electoral victory—are of special interest in an election cycle enlivened by the presence of a female candidate. What do many of us think, and why are we not quitting our day jobs to work for her campaign? The selection of Governor Sarah Palin as the vice presidential running mate with Republican presidential hopeful John M…
Read More…secution and marginalization early in our history, when we were too few in numbers to adequately protect ourselves and when society’s leaders often seemed disinclined to help. Our parents, young adults, teens and children should therefore, of all people, be especially sensitive to the vulnerable in society and be willing to speak out against bullying or intimidation whenever it occurs, including unkindness toward those who are attracted to others…
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…sation is unfolding within a divided American Buddhist community. Specific numbers are hard to pin down, and estimates vary widely, but roughly three-quarters of American Buddhists are Asian. The remainder are predominantly white converts. Practitioners in the Asian diaspora typically join communities that are aligned with sects popular in their origin countries. Convert Buddhists, on the other hand, tend to congregate at meditation-oriented Buddh…
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