Religion Dispatches
…t some Muslims use to justify mistreatment of outsiders, including violent mistreatment, is used to justify mistreatment of women inside Islam. I condemn it, and have done so for decades here and abroad. As regrettable as violence is, I don’t apologize for it. I don’t think an apology is beneficial. I think working for justice is beneficial and I did that: before and after September 11th, and I see no reason why I should not continue. But here’s t…
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…ychotherapeutic organizations reject notions of the pathological in sexual minorities, dominant religious and cultural ideology is in a state of crisis. It is no longer an unquestioned assumption that heterosexual experience represents the definition of reality for all people. The power to define reality for the masses is at stake and this power comes with all manner of political and ideological implications. Thus, there is a vested interest on th…
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…anks to their enormous popularity, Luce’s publications had their share of imitators. None came close to testing the dominance of Time until one would-be rival was bought by the Washington Post Company in 1961. Newsweek had been founded by an ex-Time staffer almost thirty years before, and perhaps as a filial rejection of a former employer’s concerns, in the beginning Newsweek published very little about religion generally, and less about Catholics…
Read More…e that would posthumously make Phelps gay. Last year, Greaves travelled to Mississippi and performed a similar “pink mass” over the grave of Phelps’s mother. Local police vowed to charge Greaves with grave desecration, but no arrests were made. APRIL In April, the Satanic Temple announced its “Protect Children Project,” which opposes the use of corporal punishment in schools. It encouraged students to assert their religious conviction that their b…
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…, Heritage USA, and a private satellite network that reached into fourteen million homes in the US. That year, six million people visited Heritage USA. Jim and Tammy lived in luxury, buying vacation homes, expensive cars and clothes, and traveling first class with an entourage. Then it all came crashing down. In March 1987 Bakker resigned in disgrace after his 1980 sexual encounter with Jessica Hahn in a Florida hotel room became public. Stories e…
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…ess of this scandal and what role, if any, he had in how the situation was mishandled at the Vatican, reminding his followers about the true mission of the church and to focus on Jesus Christ. What do the Christians believe? The recent health care debates surfaced the radical differences that exist among Christians about health and care. On the one side are conservative Christians who see in the recent legislative victory for President Obama nothi…
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…s difficult not to notice that the West—the rich, powerful twin—has seldom missed an opportunity to leverage Eastern Christian misfortune to its own advantage. The Crusades themselves are an excellent example, but Catholic power grabs in places like Ukraine during the 16th century around the fall of Constantinople also demonstrate this problem. Which brings us back to Thursday’s consecration. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which holds…
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…lar Serene Jones by Elijah Prewitt-Davis.) But it is clear that Beck is dismissing the faith of millions when he creates a simplistic label—‘individual’ or ‘collective’—and declares the latter to be un-Christian. For many Christians, says J. Brent Walker of the Baptist Joint Committee, it’s a both/and, an individual decision nurtured by a church community. Max Carter, a Friends minister (and, like Walker, a commenter on a recent Washington Post On…
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…take. And only if the beth din deems the allegation to be true will the family be permitted to go to the authorities. Ocean County Prosecutor Marlene Lynch Ford, who brought the case against Yosef Kolko, is concerned that such actions limit a prosecutor’s ability to secure a conviction. “By having a diversion to a different type of tribunal, no matter how well intentioned the people involved are, it ultimately makes the job of getting a criminal…
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…drawn the attention of some authorities: The trend of prosecuting “blasphemies” shared through social media is most marked in Muslim-majority countries. For example, in addition to the tragic, but all too familiar, wave of blasphemy prosecutions in Pakistan, this year saw prosecutions for allegedly atheist comments on Facebook and Twitter in Bangladesh, Bahrain, Egypt, Indonesia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Turkey. In some of these cases,…
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