Religion Dispatches
…y I cannot do that until the public and intellectuals alike stop offering up essentialist visions of cultural products like yoga. Resisting the siren call of orthodoxy to claim a site of origin or authenticity is dangerous—it destabilizes our own sense of authority—yet it holds the possibility of empowerment….
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…ssion at the UNESCO forum extremely limited. Catholic Church: Some Vatican officials embrace new LGBT-friendly book; conservatives unhappy The conservative LifeSiteNews published a column complaining that the Vatican “has selected a prominent LGBT-pushing Jesuit priest to be a consultor to its communications office.” The priest in question is James Martin, editor-at-large of America magazine, who in 2016 received a Bridge Building Award from New W…
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…hreat to the imperial occupiers of his day. His life calls us to point out sites of violence and crucifixion and resist them with all of the fury love can bring. I personally don’t believe the cross is a site of redemption (many Christians don’t), but I do believe it asks us to take the reality of suffering seriously. In the words of feminist theologian Mary Solberg, the theology of the cross might offer “compelling knowledge” that beckons people…
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…In their paper, Ho and his coauthors write that “visitors may decrease the number of incense sticks burned and period of stay at temples.” In my travels, I did visit temples that tried to suggest limits on how many incense sticks people should burn. Some temples have tried to deal with this problem by extinguishing incense sticks after they have been burning for a while. Particularly in Hong Kong, I sometimes saw large buckets of water standing ne…
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…despite abundant research demonstrating that secular societies are the opposite of the hedonistic dens of crime and despair that some believers suggest a godless society would become. Christine Vigeant and Sarah Paquette, both former students of Boghossian, are the managers of Atheos. “We aren’t interested in making atheists. We are interested in making people reason more effectively, to make their arguments based on reason,” Vigeant told me. She…
Read More…ght guaranteed in the country’s constitution. See journalist Rex Wockner’s site for ongoing reporting and analysis of the complex and shifting marriage landscape in Mexico. The Transgender Law Center and the Cornell Law School LGBT Clinic released “Report on Human Rights Conditions of Transgender Women in Mexico,” which documents “pervasive discrimination, hatred, violence, police abuse, rape, torture, and murder.” Kyrgyzstan: Anti-LGBT bill delay…
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…churches in America to explicitly reach out to LGBTQ Catholics, became the site of near-daily funerals for AIDS victims. People gathered there to grieve, and the grief was nonstop. Fr. Anthony McGuire, pastor at the time, told Jesuit Fr. Donal Godfrey that “it was harrowing. I used to weep a lot at funerals. There was no break to it. It was one after another after another.” Sanctuaries have a long history in the often bloody struggle for equality…
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…Christian businessmen have treated the American marketplace as a religious site—and a means to promote evangelical Christianity and its politics. Controversies surrounding Chick-fil-A, Hobby Lobby, and bakers who refuse to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples are just the latest in a series of public skirmishes between self-described Christian entrepreneurs and the laws and regulations that govern American business. Indeed, as historian Darren…
Read More…t decade, especially against transgender citizens. Mexico: Catholic Church officials rallying opposition to president’s equality proposal Catholic Church officials have called for a marches in September opposing President Enrique Peña Nieto’s proposed constitutional changes on marriage equality. Legislative officials have continued to make it clear that they are not terribly interested in acting on the president’s initiative. Activists appealed to…
Read More…Scott explains in The Politics of the Veil that the Muslim headscarf is a site where questions about divergent cultural standards—particularly those standards pertaining to sex—could play out. According to Scott, “French norms of sexual conduct [are] taken to be both natural and universal.” In contrast, she argues, “Muslim sexuality [is represented as] unnatural and oppressive when compared to an imagined French way of doing sex.” Similarly, the…
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