Religion Dispatches
…and once in Genesis (19:1–11), in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the New Testament, homosexual acts might be mentioned, depending on the interpretation, in Paul’s letter to the Romans condemning men’s “shameless” sexual acts with each other (just which acts are not named) and in his condemnation of women’s “unnatural” sexual acts (1:26–27). Biblical and Talmudic scholars, as well as historians specializing in the study of premodern Christian…
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…ind it hard to believe that this movement exists, and there’s certainly a “news of the weird” part of any story about an 18-child family. But whether people approach such news as something freakish or something beautiful, there’s so much more to the conviction than the novelty of such large families. I think most readers would be shocked and surprised, as I was, to read what a dramatic reversal of women’s rights the Quiverfull and patriarchy movem…
Read More…IV-infected. Whether it is a Sunday morning talk show, the front page of a newspaper, or the evening news, I continue to be amazed at how little the Vatican press office has to do to assure softball questions, few dissident voices, and reverent talk about the number of ciboria necessary to serve communion in baseball stadiums. And, we are all supposed to know what ciboria are (for the record, they are the goblet-shaped metal vessels that hold the…
Read More…violence appears to have been incited by Buddhist monks. The Rohingya, who number almost one million, have been denied citizenship since 1982 and subjected to denials of the rights to travel, marry and have children. The discrimination appears rooted in the ethnic group’s Muslim faith, which makes them a tiny minority in the majority-Buddhist nation. The most notable participants in the violence are a movement of Buddhist monks called “969”. The…
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…ced Marriage equality legislation was introduced on Valentine’s Day Japan: New film featuring transgender character ‘breaks boundaries’ in Japanese cinema A new film by Naoko Ogigami, “Close-Knit,” won second prize in the Panorama Audience Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Kenta Kato reports for Asia Times: “A transgender character is at the film’s center and is played by one of Japan’s superstars in Toma Ikuta, no less.” Close-Knit…
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…s in the public sphere. David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam, authors of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, wrote in a New York Times op-ed last summer that what makes the Tea Party movement so unpopular to a large segment of the population is the conservative impulse to mix religion and politics. Americans, they suggest, oppose the mingling of the two. And yet Campbell and Putnam’s own data show that the majority of Americans c…
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…d not just be printed willy-nilly. In fact, as he pressed the case for his new style of bank and his new style of banknote, he often remarked that any banker who printed runs of paper money without the necessary capital to back them up deserved a death sentence. He came to regret that suggestion. The endlessly fascinating aspect of both the Madoff and Law stories has something to do with the confusion created by large numbers. The point is, in the…
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…the babies” themselves, both saving money and demonstrating their faith. A number of Quiverfull families follow a similar arc (as had Garrison) graduating from conventional hospital births—often where mothers felt pushed into a birth plan they didn’t desire—to midwife-assisted births at home, to the final challenge of unattended home births. It’s a logical extreme of the movement whose naturalistic bent actually overlaps with the back-to-the-land,…
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…cularly bread and butter, issues—much more than foreign policy—that shaped American voting, given the data cited earlier. More or less telling Americans to be grateful for economic improvements that barely affect those who are still struggling is counterproductive to say the least. At the end of the day, it’s possible there was nothing the Democrats could have done to stave off the perfect storm that’s brought an insurrection inciter whose own for…
Read More…gh participation rates are increasing among these types of churches, they represent a small percentage of all churches. Fulton explains that a lot of this increase is due to the debates over immigration reform; but even factoring that in, Hispanic churches are becoming more politically active. The number of congregations might be few, but they may also be larger communities, representing a substantial number of people. In any case, the trend will…
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