Religion Dispatches
…ested North Point Ministries, also in the Atlanta area. Gateway Church, in Texas, urged parishioners to post a selfie of themselves with someone they’d brought to church, as part of the #EasterYourSelfie campaign. At least one church actively discouraged selfies, though. 3) Hashtagging to Calvary One advantage of hashtags: you can string a series of tweets into a kind of narrative. For example, in the days leading up to Easter, Campus Crusade for…
Read More
…karni are also earning national praise for their campaigns in Maryland and Texas, respectively, with Miller now being targeted by Republicans in a smear campaign. As former RNC chair Michael Steele noted to the Washington Post, “she’s perceived as a strong potential candidate.” Hindu Americans have long been aligned with the Democratic party, but in recent years, the GOP has aggressively courted them as voters, donors, and even candidates. Accordi…
Read More
…as a child. (More recently, it is worth noting, religious right leaders in Texas have sought to ban any mention of Cesar Chavez from public school textbooks.) Much of Ganz’s book focuses on how three unions (the Teamsters, an organizing committee of the AFL-CIO, and the group that became the UFW) competed, beginning in the 1960s; and why the UFW prevailed over these more powerful, better financed, and politically connected entities. The main reaso…
Read More
…ers in protesting the opening of a Planned Parenthood facility in Houston, Texas, charging that the “spirit of Herod” was behind it and that “abortion is anti-Latino, anti-black and anti-life.” He continued to align himself with the Republican Party on reproductive and LGBT issues, even as evangelical promotion of immigration reform fell on deaf GOP ears. More recently, Rodriguez jumped on board the anti-contraception bandwagon, supporting conserv…
Read More…ow it underpins Roe v. Wade, and, as Chris Geidner points out, Lawrence v. Texas. They claim these rights are not actually found in the Constitution but were created by “activist judges” — this from the people who think the 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection to fertilized eggs. At his press conference today, Santorum alluded to reproduction and procreation by praising the family as “the moral enterprise that is America,” and by specificall…
Read More…s and television shows [about Warren Jeffs, the FLDS, and the YFZ Ranch in Texas]. There are many things I could say about all this, but I’ll say simply that often the strong reaction people have is not with polygamy per se, but with how little separation there is between polygamy and the way we live now. The liberal-minded among us believe that adults should be able to create the family structure of their choice, but so often, because polygamy ar…
Read More
…lifornia’s electoral votes went to a Republican presidential candidate and Texas had the “bluest” of blue governors (1988 and 1995 respectively). They may be shocked by how quickly these changes occur. As we sit here writing this piece, our home state of Iowa is overwhelmingly aligned with conservative politics and policies. Bills coming through the state legislature’s subcommittee’s include things like HF367, a performative piece of vice-signalin…
Read More…ain.” American justice seems to favor Christians, everyone else be damned. Texas is set to execute Patrick Murphy, who became a Buddhist a decade ago, and the state gave Murphy a choice: he can have either “a Christian prison chaplain or no chaplain present.” “Die with our god or die alone,” the Lone Star State appears to be saying. Murphy challenged this as a violation of his First Amendment right to religious freedom. He lost at the lower court…
Read More…who leads an “ex-gay ministry” at Stonegate Fellowship Church in Midland, Texas, starts his story like plenty of other gay or lesbian coming out stories I have ever heard. As a young boy, I thought more about how different and isolated I felt from the other boys. As I grew older and my feelings of being different became sexual, I thought more about how lonely and how dirty I felt—wondering if I was abominable to God. I worried about my feelings b…
Read More…for prayer. Jindal was joined by governors in other Gulf states including Texas, Alabama and Mississippi. Today, on the 70th day, Tropical Storm Alex is expected to be upgraded to the season’s first hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. But the storm looks like it could be a mixed blessing: On one hand, according to the Associated Press, “skimming vessels may be idled because they can’t operate in such swells. Floating oil-containment booms could be r…
Read More