Religion Dispatches
…ates, self-contain’d, different from others, more expansive, more rich and free, to be evidenced by original authors and poets to come, by American personalities, plenty of them, make and female, traversing the states, none excepted… and by a sublime and serious Religious Democracy sternly taking command, dissolving the old, sloughing off the surfaces, and from its own interior and vital principles reconstructing, democratizing society. A religio…
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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…
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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…erved at communion tables arrived through “illegal” hands. After foisting “free trade” schemes on to the vulnerable Mexican countryside, we feign shock at the consequent intensification of the northward flow of desperate farmers escaping the flood of subsidized American corn. Or, having glutted the worldwide coffee market with ambitious development schemes (in Vietnam), we wonder why thousands of farmers from southern Mexico and Central America, f…
Read More…quotes Vsevolod Chaplin, “an Orthodox archpriest responsible for relations between the church, which feels gays are ill and in need of divine forgiveness,” and the Kremlin. Chaplin is “very happy” that Putin is “speaking about the moral dimensions of society.” Meanwhile, the Principal 6 campaign we wrote about last week has been invited, and has agreed, to sponsor the Australian men’s and women’s bobsled teams, a move that should give it more vis…
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…Utah television station even ran a nightly news segment suggesting a link between the changes, Proposition 8, and the protests following Elder Boyd K. Packer’s controversial conference talk on homosexuality. Yesterday, the Church newsroom went on the defensive with a blog post decrying the poor journalism of the local television news crew (shocking), especially its narrative linking of recent protests to the CHI changes, pointing out that the rev…
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…and plentiful, and the collapse of the licensing laws insured a degree of free speech hitherto unknown in the British Isles. The World Turned Upside Down would prove so enduring that it has been an English folk ballad for more than 350 years. The song’s opening verse, “Holy-dayes are despis’d, new fashions are devis’d. /Old Christmas is kicked out of Town” remains pertinent. It seems that a supposed “War on Christmas,” whether real or imagined, h…
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…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…
Read More…onfusion now dogs the debate over employers’ First Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion and the new insurance mandates under the Affordable Care Act, which include birth control. The argument that seems to be winning in court is that employers who oppose the use of birth control for religious reasons should not have to provide it to their workers. Only in a world in which labor has been alienated from production, however, can such an…
Read More…next front in the religious right’s military culture war, in which it has promoted overt proselytizing by both chaplains and officers, and in the process, portrayed the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as epic confrontations between Christianity and Islam. Now, with its military evangelists in place, the religious right is taking one of its civilian crusades — to paint homosexuality as a religious war between the equal rights of sexual minorities…
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