Religion Dispatches
…Pew’s forthcoming reports will provide greater depth to understanding the nature and significance of these changes. The release of these initial numbers makes one thing clear: the water is changing, and fast….
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…d more extreme positions. This rhetoric has consequences. The British attorney general Suella Braverman, for instance, recently claimed that schools have no legal obligation to affirm trans pupils—to address them using their pronouns or their chosen name. But while the UK is at the forefront of Europe’s anti-trans bigotry—with even some leftist or liberal news outlets like the Guardian or the BBC enabling the effort, the UK is far from the only pl…
Read More…sing and employment. While there are large carve-outs for church-related/owned businesses, the ordinances in SLC inspired a number of other Utah and Idaho towns and cities to follow suit and opened many conservative Mormon’s eyes to some problems they’d never before considered. – There have been no church-sponsored efforts aimed at mobilizing Mormons to fight same-sex marriage at the polls the way Mormons were mobilized in California in 2008, desp…
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…murdered last Saturday in his home in Bogota. Activists called on the Attorney General’s office to investigate, saying that previous human rights activists’ killers have gone unpunished. Exodus International: Former ‘Ex-Gay’ Leader Marries in Oklahoma John Smid, former director of “ex-gay” group Love in Action, and who spent 11 years on the board of Exodus International, married his same-sex partner in Oklahoma on Sunday. World Bank: Profile of LG…
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…ous group most likely to indicate outright refusal to take a Covid-19 vaccine, while a number of other studies have also found that number hovering close to 25 percent. Journalists and academics alike have attempted to make sense of this discrepancy, pointing to existential fear, anti-intellectualism, and Christian nationalism as potential influences on American evangelicals’ vaccine antipathy. As a scholar of American evangelicalism and media, I…
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…a pregnancy. As historian Andrea Tone has shown in detail, Lysol was just one of a number of unregulated contraceptive products advertised in women’s magazines and in newspapers. Comstockery, in other words, endangered women by creating an environment where quackery and scammers could thrive. Unsurprisingly, a harsh cleaning product had adverse effects. A 1936 book by Rachel Lynn Palmer and Sarah K. Greenberg, M.D. called Facts and Frauds in Femin…
Read More…rters remain hopeful as the denomination begins its General Assembly in Minneapolis next week. Lisa Larges, head of That All May Freely Serve, said, “Faith traditions are moving toward a new understanding of God’s diverse creation. The time for policies based on our love of God and call to serve has come. Churches are learning to affirm gifts for ministry rather than reject ministers because of whom they chose as a life partner.” Several pro-gay m…
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…climate care and climate change in these faith communities are changing. That would be an awesome study. My sense is that after big storm events, each time a big city gets hit, that city becomes more attuned to climate change. That certainly seemed to be the case in New York, with Sandy. I think of that as being the case in New Orleans as well. Well, we have noticed the city looking to Rice University for expert help: on how should we do our levee…
Read More…ng on to the lies being told by the religious right. Gay and lesbian people don’t want to “redefine” marriage—they want the same kind of marriage everyone else has, complete with kids, a dog, and a nice neighborhood. Weird, right?…
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…ecies is amazing: fire, numbers, alphabets or pictographic language, medicine, architecture, money and banking, art, music, laws etc. Choices got us there. We are still making choices both as individuals and societies. Not all of them are good—but, we can change the bad choices, we hope. The children’s series that Montgomery helped to create put readers in exactly that position, again and again. The title of the series is sometimes taken, now, to…
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