Religion Dispatches
…le waiting on God to pick us up and Rapture us into heaven because we’re just sure we’re among the chosen. We’re too busy getting ours to worry about whose getting left behind in this lifetime. It reminds me of the bumper sticker that reads, “Jesus is coming, look busy.” We’re so concerned to look busy—to look like we’re about God’s business in the world, that we forget what it means to truly be about God’s business in the world. Jesus isn’t some…
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…h it did not get a vote in the recently expired Eighth Parliament, it will most likely be reintroduced soon in the new session. If passed, the law will make any homosexual intimacy punishable by life in prison, or death if the participants are HIV positive. In the months prior to the bill’s emergence, Muslim and Christian ministers called on the government to crack down on gays. Very similar rhetoric is now being heard in Ghana, with gays being ac…
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…boy who longed for dresses. “I grew up in my mom’s closet,” she said. “For most of my life that was just something I did. It was not who I was. And I understood it as something that was wrong. Then that wrongness became a sin. God was clearly displeased with my need to express myself in feminine ways.” Robinson tried to suppress this desire. She married, had kids and went to divinity school. As a man, Robinson pastored a Baptist church in a small…
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…stown would hold until September 11, 2001. In Stories from Jonestown, the most recent addition to the Jonestown library, Leigh Fondakowski has compiled the numerous interviews that she conducted in order to write her play, The People’s Temple, which ran at the Berkeley Repertory Theater from April 15 to June 5 of 2005. Fondakowski, best known for penning the highly regarded play-turned-HBO-movie The Laramie Project, told the New York Times that a…
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…couple to whom Phillips denied service. Because Masterpiece Cakeshop, like most of the arguments against same-sex marriage that have appeared in our public discourse over the past several decades, has been explicitly, or at least implicitly, religious in nature, we often assume that the fight over same-sex marriage is essentially a contest between religious and secular perspectives. But the story of religious advocacy for same-sex marriage and the…
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…me the opportunity to trace the background of that fascination. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? I hope readers come away with two things. First, that American popular religion and popular culture have tended to influence one another in very strange, but very real, ways. The 1973 film The Exorcist has had enormous influence over how everyone from Pentecostal “deliverance ministers” to Roman Catholic priests understand exorc…
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…however, that the committed Catholic women at the conference found Francis most lacking, and his failure to make the connection between women, poverty and fertility most confounding. At the heart of Francis’ problematic views on women, according to several speakers, is his insistence on complementarity—the idea that women and men were designed for different (and, of course, complementary) roles. Apart from that, he has called women theologians “th…
Read More…onstant attacks, kidnappings, extortion and police harassment. Recently, almo*]}*st a dozen LGBT people were taken by the United Nation’s refugee agency (UNHCR) to a safe house in Nairobi, after they were attacked on a night out. Even that agency – the very group tasked with protected LGBT people – has admitted its own staff are hostile. The deputy head of protection for UNHCR told me that staff have said that as Christians they could not work with, o…
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…t Muslim populations desire representative and accountable governments—the most basic understanding of democracy—and regard democratic procedures, such as elections, as the appropriate mechanism for establishing such governments. An extensive multiyear Gallup research study conducted between 2001 and 2007 in more than 35 nations that have predominantly Muslim or substantial Muslim populations (claiming to have surveyed a sample representing over 9…
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…Square of its dreams, but, after being ignored by the mainstream media for most of the weekend, it eventually snagged global attention—if mainly of the dismissive you-crazy-kids-and-your-protests sort. What Would Jesus Do Now? Aside from a “sermon” from anti-consumerism performance artist and activist The Rev. Billy (Bill Talen), the protests appear to have been unmarked by any consideration of spiritual or religious perspectives on economic justi…
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