Religion Dispatches
It is his fault. When his people rose up, he turned his armies on them; when they fought back, he slaughtered them. He laid siege to Benghazi, and promised a massacre. He was the one who seized power, who oppressed, repressed, tortured, humiliated, and offended. And yet. I was ecstatic over Egypt’s revolution, thrilled by Tunisia’s, and still hurt to see what’s happening in Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria. As much as I was concerned by the far more vio…
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…esbyterian Church (U.S.A) made headlines recently after its local presbyteries voted to, as the New York Times put it, approve same-sex marriage. This new definition will go into effect in June. Given the tensions this issue has caused, both within the PCUSA and among many other denominations, it shouldn’t be very surprising that the phrasing in the PCUSA’s Book of Order was changed from “between a man and a woman” to “between two people, traditio…
Read More…ross the Mormon grapevine: an openly gay Mormon man named Mitch Mayne had been asked (or “called,” in Mormon parlance) to serve as a leader in an LDS congregation in San Francisco. Before receiving his call to serve in San Francisco, Mayne had been attending an LDS congregation in Oakland, where Mormons have been especially active in efforts to repair damage to interfaith and LDS-LGBT relations since the LDS Church’s heavy involvement in Californi…
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…ives for constitutional amendments in states across the country.” Several weeks later, the firm announced that it also would be representing anti-gay activist Scott Lively in a lawsuit brought by a Ugandan LGBT rights group, charging he incited persecution of sexual minorities there. The lawsuit, Liberty Counsel’s founder and chairman Mat Staver said, “is a gross attempt to use a vague international law to silence, and eventually criminalize, spee…
Read MoreIn light of my recent Bloggingheads.tv conversation with Peter Beinart, it’s worth noting that David Brook’s latest atrocity is also a shallow recasting of the ideas of Reinhold Niebuhr, except that meh, it’s not. If you’ve read Moral Man and Immoral Society, you’ll know that Niebuhr was indeed concerned with the tradeoffs in moving from individual to social relationships. As the book’s title implies, Niebuhr thought it was easier for individuals…
Read MoreAfter Rick Perry told a meeting of governors that it was “fine with me” that New York had passed its gay marriage law, the religious right got nervous. As much as Perry can’t get enough of the 10th Amendment, and sometimes even loves a little secession talk, he apparently had a brain fart about those special circumstances in which America will be hurtling ever faster towards Judgment Day unless the otherwise overreaching, tyrannical, freedom-crus…
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…icial NFL Super Bowl Gospel Celebration on the Friday before Super Bowl XLVII? Yeah, me neither. In fact, I’m a little embarrassed to admit that despite having spent the better part of my adult life studying and writing about gospel (albeit the Southern white variety rather than the more familiar black gospel tradition featured at the Super Bowl event), I had never heard of this “faith and football” celebration before the good folks over at Queert…
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…OKE stunt and have some questions for you before I cut to the chase. I’ve been watching the new Rings of Power series based on the works of Professor JRR Tolkien who was a medievalist, philologist, and fantasy author of The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and other works. Let me explain why your casting choices in this latest series are WRONG. I’m an amateur historian, well-versed in the Middle-earthian universe, and I believe that th…
Read More…of marriage equality. “I think the ship has sailed and I think the church needs—I think this is the world we are living in and we need to affirm people wherever they are,” Bell continued. This declaration is the latest step in Bell’s “search for a more forgiving faith,” a process Kelefa Sanneh detailed in The New Yorker last November. Bell first truly rocked the conservative Christian world in 2011 by questioning the existence of hell in his book…
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…tion for the Family, the parent organization to the World Congress of Families, bragged in a fundraising email about the organization working with the government of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban and praising the campaign Orban has been waging what philanthropist George Soros calls an “unrelenting propaganda campaign” against him, including “seeking to deny accreditation to his Soros-funded university.” As with its backing of Vladimir Putin in R…
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