Religion Dispatches
…ed up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the Obama administration was “unfriendly to religion” more than doubled from 17 percent to 36 percent between 2009 and 2014. And it was white Catholics who were overwhelmingly in favor of Trump—60 percent versus 37 percent for Clinton, a stunning gap of 23 points. While Clinton did win Hispanic Catholics by a similar wide margin…
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…e mandate and who fostered outrage over the supposed violation of religious freedom that has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. It’s a case where the numbers matter, but many people don’t seem to pay all that much attention to them….
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…Roman Empire. It can be a source of hope for the oppressed, as it was in apartheid Africa; a critique of imperialism and commercialism; a call to remember the impact that class and gender can and does have on power dynamics. The book is more than a Doomsday Clock. Likewise, “that zombie crap you teach,” as one relative not-so-gently expressed his opinion of my course, matters. It matters because examining the monsters we fantasize about (zombies…
Read More…d Perez-Trugila indicate that sex abuse scandals cost the church money and participation, but not necessarily faith. For many Millennials and members of Generation X, who make up the largest percentage of the religiously unaffiliated, the sex abuse scandal may or may not be as much of an issue as it was to their parents and grandparents. Christian Smith, who is co-Principal Investigator of the multi-year National Study of Youth and Religion at Not…
Read More…and a growing number of conservative African-American candidates. A record number of black Republicans ran in this midterm election (some had already lost their primaries), and two are heading to Congress. Tim Scott will be the first African-American Republican to represent South Carolina in Congress since Reconstruction. (He beat out Strom Thurmond’s son in the primaries.) Iraq war veteran Allen West will be headed to Congress from Florida, despi…
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…g to identify potentially radical organizations and individuals. The Green Number, or Numéro Vert, is a private telephone hotline in France where family and friends can report someone they fear may become radicalized. And in the U.K., Prevent is a program that essentially creates ‘trigger warnings’ for teachers and institutions to report the potential for radicalization. I do not mean to condemn or even criticize these programs, merely to point ou…
Read More…you made it into the book. I told him I do not need the recognition of the particular parties involved, including the neo-Orientalist scholar who edited it, to affirm my contributions to Islam (or to my faith, for both are part of my devotion to Allah). They do have a substantial number of women included, so I would not complain on that count. But, here’s the thing: there are no women under the category of Muslim intellectuals. Apparently women do…
Read More…olleague Hussein Rashid pointed out in this must-read piece), Mormons, the number two most disliked religion in America, have no business contributing to public rage against the number one most disliked religion in America. Nor in trafficking in falsehoods like “Islam is an ideology, not a religion,” a line I’ve been hearing from a few Mormons in recent days. Islam is in fact a religion for which Mormon leaders from the time of George A. Smith…
Read More…up to protest against Pride have been vastly outnumbered by the Christians participating in it. Hill also noted religious support in the UK last April for a new law “to allow religious elements in civil partnerships, while last year the Quakers became the first major Christian denomination to resolve to carry out same-sex marriages.” Even here in the United States, the trend toward full acceptance of gays and lesbians seems to be growing. A Gallup…
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…Moonage Daydream,” he boasts that he’s “a rock ‘n’ rollin’ bitch,” a “mama-papa coming for you”; in “Lady Stardust,” he slip-slides between genders, morphing into the ladyboy of the title. Ziggy’s twofold nature—gender-bending ladyboy, switch-hitting bisexual, “mama-papa” (an image recalling the freakshow hermaphrodite known as a half-and-half)—aligns him with the intersexed or androgynous deities of pre-Christian myth. This archetype, which the h…
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