Religion Dispatches
…n’t seem to realize that the kinds of same-sex relations that are going on today are not like same-sex relations at other times in human history. There were always people of the same sex having sexual relations, but today there are new claims. It’s like our proposals for more equality in marriage over and against the patriarchal marriage of the past. Same-sex couples are making claims as families and asking for thing like marriage. Same-sex Muslim…
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…hat’s a projection, and it’s based on the analysis of trends that are seen today. My suspicion is that they are underestimating the importance of this new transparency. It takes twenty years to grow a Baptist, and twenty minutes to lose one. And I think that people may be in for some real surprises in those areas. After all, it’s only been a decade or two that this has been an issue for Muslim children. Are they going to let their children have ce…
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…of things. And when I was about to turn 40, I became interested in health promotion and disease prevention from a personal standpoint. As I read recommendations regarding health promotion and good healthy forms of living, it occurred to me that we were in fact reinventing the wheel. All these recommendations and so forth seem to be reiterations of how people were living before agriculture. And then it occurred to me that our genetics have changed…
Read More…rket. But it does seem that the two opposing traditions have come together today to act as a powerful rhetoric of gratitude as indebtedness. Today we have a thriving self-help industry that churns out a steady stream of books on pop psychology, happiness, and gratitude. How well do these grapple with the issues you’ve raised? I was a little surprised by how little attention is paid to the history of gratitude in the self-help literature. I see my…
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…rganizing and firepower that progressives will need to defeat conservatism today. To be sure, there are cleavages within the conservative movement. Some cultural conservatives are willing to support contraception and comprehensive sex-ed in the name of reducing the need for abortion. Some hawks who supported the Iraq war nevertheless oppose torture and executive secrecy. And many fiscal conservatives are as disgusted with the lack of transparency…
Read More…more dangerous: A monied and sophisticated indifference to reality. Islam today, science tomorrow. (No, wait; make that misrepresenting Islam and science today.) We must keep in mind the effect this will have on our constitutional rights and freedoms. Those who want to target the rituals and practices of a misunderstood religious community can very easily expand their target to other populations. We’ve come too far as a country, in terms of t…
Read More…a lot of people about the significance of evolution and how it got us here today. More importantly, it seems to have engaged the science education community to develop ways to address the teaching of evolution more directly. Today, evolution education has gained prominence with a host of new teaching programs. Certainly in the case of Dover, teachers in the school district there were timid about teaching the subject, fearing it would offend the Ch…
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…in a whole series of laws, many of which we pay absolutely no attention to today. Such as? There’s a law that says you can’t wear blends of cotton and linen, or wool and linen. Nobody rails against people wearing blends today. There were very specific reasons for those laws that no longer make sense. In order to understand the reasoning behind “no man shall lie with another man” we have to take into account the fact that at that time they didn’t u…
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…ggie Gallagher—who also worked with the National Fatherhood Initiative—“to promote marriage”; and “gave money to writer Mike McManus to support marriage promotion, while also giving money to McManus’ organization, Marriage Savers (‘a ministry that equips … local congregations to prepare for lifelong marriages …’).” Horn was, coincidentally, a founding board member of Marriage Savers. In addition to the NFI grants, in 2006 the organization received…
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…power and influence of protestant liberalism has all but died. In America today, liberal Protestantism exists in a persistent vegetative state. Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent resignation of Dr. Brad Braxton, the now ex-pastor of Riverside Church, NYC. Dr. Braxton’s resignation, after a controversial nine months, is symptomatic of a deep theological and ethnic dilemma among progressive Christians. This dilemma, which is spelled ou…
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