Religion Dispatches
Today is Draw Muhammad Day. Created in response to two idiots who reacted to a South Park episode, the event signifies that the right to do something should be seen as a license to do something. The South Park episode focused on the failure of censorship. Comedy Central, like the two buffoons from Revolution Muslim, missed the point and focused on the non-representation of Muhammad, causing the episode to be censored. The response of the supporte…
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…e lifespan was far shorter and average living conditions more squalid than today, outbreaks of plague were frequent, and death in childbirth was commonplace. In that context, it would have made no sense to say that pregnancy and childbirth were fundamentally safe, well-designed, healthy, blissful processes that if left alone would result in a healthy mother and baby. That idea wouldn’t come along until… Grantly Dick-Read and the early natural chil…
Read More…. evangelicals must take responsibility for David’s blood!” In a statement today, Political Research Associates condemned the murder and demanded an end to “the export of homophobia to Uganda by American conservatives.” “Kato’s murder is a heavy blow to the international human rights community,” said Rev. Kapya Kaoma, the director of PRA’s Project on Religion and Sexuality. “Those U.S conservatives who have lit the brushfire of homophobia in Afric…
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…old Tyler Clementi, 13-year-old Seth Walsh, and 19-year-old Raymond Chase. Today, it is very clear to me that profound sadness and stunned silence is no longer a suitable, appropriate, or adequate response. From Lamentation to Indignation My sadness began to change into something different with each successive news story about another gay teen hanging himself, shooting himself, or jumping off a bridge. As I saw the faces of these young victims and…
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…ized around categories and silos that don’t reflect how people really live today or the work we have to do understand the world we live in. To change this, you have to be in conversation with the right kind of people. You have to make a commitment to talk interdisciplinarily. You can’t be with people who will retreat to the fallback position of their discipline. You have to invite people to the table who are willing to ask questions from new persp…
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…us Supreme Court called the restauranteur’s defense “patently frivolous.”) Today, there is a similar but not identical logic in some of the controversies on which I have previously reported, especially those of the baker who wouldn’t create a custom cake for a gay wedding and the foster care agency that refused to place children with a lesbian couple. The challenge today is how to distinguish between, on the one hand, attempts to license discrimin…
Read MoreToday Gallup announced the results of a survey in which 77 percent of Americans “say religion is losing its influence on American life,” which represents “the most negative evaluation” of religion’s impact since 1970. Writing today in Religion Dispatches, I have to wonder about the future of any publication with “religion” in its name. Is it time for a mission overhaul or simply rebranding? It’s not that RD has been oblivious to the trend. An int…
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…ghtmares. In somewhat the same way that climate change denialism functions today, the Atoms for Peace campaign merely divided public opinion, allowing some to sleep easy and the most knowledgeable people even more distraught and fearful. Events like the recent reactor meltdown in Northeastern Japan can bring even the sleepers back to the edge of anxiety, and then there’s the persistent fear that a nut job or a terrorist will decide to usher in apo…
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…l the political troubles that plague everyday life in Northern Nigeria are today—which is precisely why this retreat to politicized religion has happened. Walking down the streets in the cities Jos and Bauchi and then venturing into the rural villages, dust and mud are the overwhelming hues. The land is difficult, not just because of the droughts slowly creeping their way further and further south from the Sahara, not just because the crops are su…
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…with the founding of the UN. All of these things still resonate and matter today.” This story of divine providence, linking 1776 and 1948, is core to the Christian Zionist imaginary of the United States and Israel as twin ‘shining cities on a hill’ (to paraphrase Reagan, who borrowed it from Puritan John Winthrop), charged with a crusade to save the West. Hegseth summed it up in a March 2019 speech at the annual gala of the National Council of You…
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