Religion Dispatches
…le for the exemption. This will, Catholics for Choice argues, increase the number of employees of Catholic organizations who would be deprived of contraception coverage, even if they aren’t Catholic themselves (or are Catholics who dissent from the church’s opposition to birth control). HHS notes in its rule that “the exemption should not exclude group health plans of religious entities that would qualify for the exemption but for the fact that,…
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…another defense of his position that Muslims should face extra scrutiny at airports. He and I engaged in a back-and-forth about this issue earlier this year after he wrote a post where he first argued that “we should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.” In my response, I challenged his claims that talk of Islamophobia is “deluded” and that “there is no such thing as Isl…
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…ican-American print is having something of a renaissance right now, with a number of books, conferences, and journal special issues devoted to the topic emerging in the past few years. So it could seem (and some have claimed) that this is a newly invented field. But this is not at all the case. My book depends upon the work of pioneering scholars who have sometimes been ignored in the rush to stake “new” academic territory. I wrote The Black Press…
Read More…ts distributor Teodora Film, was that the film was shunned by the more than 1,100 cinemas which are owned by the Church and make up the bulk of Italy’s network of independent/arthouse theatres. The country’s official film board approved Haigh’s Nottingham-set drama for audiences over 14. “I cannot see any other explanation than a problem of homophobia in the Church,” Teodora’s president, Cesare Petrillo, told AFP. “They decided it was unacceptable…
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…tholic millennials participating in church culture is “in fact, grim.” Only 16% of millennials self-identify as Catholic according to Pew. That 16% is the group the church is struggling to hold on to. So if they are increasingly choosing the liberal side in the culture wars, are they really still Catholic? Canon Law 204.1 states that a Catholic not only has to be baptized, but also “share the profession of faith, the sacraments, and ecclesiastical…
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…Elephants: An African Love Story. Once a day, strictly between the hours of 11AM and 12PM, the orphanage opens to the public for a visitor’s fee of 500 Kenyan shillings (a little under six U.S dollars at the moment). That strict time is a kind of compromise—a minimal amount of human contact for the orphans so the orphanage can raise some necessary funds for their care. The human animals arrive, line up, pay their dues, at eleven the crowd is let i…
Read More…than it is among the civilian population, the report suggests—two for every 1,000 service members, versus 1.8 per 1,000 civilian women and one per 1,000 civilian men, according to statistics compiled by the Family Violence Prevention Fund. Perhaps, if Jackson and his friends are worried about sexual liberty and anarchy in the military, instead of seeking to prevent gay and lesbian people from serving their country, they should be doing more to wee…
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…ester NY, who lost his daughter Jean, a flight attendant on board American Airlines Flight 11. Mr. Roger said he hoped the pope would say prayers for the place, for the people, and for his daughter Jean. Praying at a unlighted candle next to the prie-dieu Pope Benedict XVI used on his visit, the Pope offered those prayers silently while looking at the south pool of the memorial. The 9/11 site has become not just a memorial or a museum—it is a pilg…
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…black Protestants, 27 percent report growing support for gay rights, while 13 percent are more opposed. What makes these numbers even more interesting is who holds sway on the opinions of these groups. Overall, doctors, therapists, and parents of gay and lesbian children or gays and lesbians themselves are seen as trusted sources of information. However, only 25 percent of Latino Catholics say they trust their own clergy leaders a lot on this iss…
Read More…Voters in the Faroe Islands, which have been autonomous from Denmark since 1948, voted for a new parliament on Tuesday. AFP reports that the one-month campaign was “dominated by gay marriage and whether to raise taxes on fishing firms.” Former colonial master Denmark became the first country in the world to recognise same-sex unions in 1989 and legalised gay marriage in 2012, but the issue remains controversial in the deeply-religious Faroes… The…
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