Religion Dispatches
…would that lead to?” another Amish man asked me. “We don’t want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a telephone. It’s not just how you use the technology that concerns us. We’re also concerned about what kind of person you become when you use it.” Just so. Sigh….
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…BT persons to despair—in fact, that acting upon this theory is a leading cause of the astronomical rates of substance abuse, homelessness, and even suicide among an entire swath of God’s people—then you may want to rethink your theory. And if you care about your theories more than you care about the lessons of compassionate attention to your LGBT neighbors, you may want to rethink your claim that you love them. And if extracting rigid gender and s…
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…rward summaries of Pew’s general findings. The Counterintuitive: A more focused group of articles highlighted the negative correlation between religiosity and the perception that science and religion are in conflict. This makes for a good hook because it’s initially counterintuitive: Slate’s Rachel E. Gross introduces the finding as a “head-scratcher,” while Grist’s Kate Yoder remarks, “Turns out that if you’re snoozing on your mattress on Sunday…
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…didn’t know those terms. Yet scholars seem to be more rigid about similar uses of language related to sex. I would also make use of recent literature on aspiring saints and feigned sanctity, clarifying what seems to be less than obvious, that religion and sexuality are not either/or categories, but both/and. I have seen your book in quite surprising places: in women’s bookstores and big chain stores, on syllabi in religious studies, history, and…
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…go through multiple layers of approval, to the point where you can’t even use the word LGBT. They’ll use something like “Spectrum” or “Welcome Ministry.” It has to be so coded that it doesn’t ruffle any feathers, and that’s not the case for women. And that’s very sad. To me, LGBT people are sometimes treated like lepers. One of the things I’ve learned in this informal ministry is the unbelievable things priests, sisters, brothers and lay associat…
Read More…s performing what comedy. Another is that the term Mormon has already been used to promote professional endeavors. In the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, a race car driver from Utah named Ab Jenkins set records for speed racing in vehicles he called the “Mormon Meteor.” No one suggested that he was claiming that his car was endorsed by the LDS establishment. Finally, officially registered trademarks can and do become so genericised that the original holder…
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…socio-cultural and religious ceremonies.” Faced with a soaring rate of Diabetes caused by the abandonment of traditional foods for “white” food products, the Tohono O’odham of the Sonora Desert have organized through communal institutions to support a return to their nearly extinct thousand-year-old former diet, writes Marcello di Cintio in Gastronomica. This so-far successful process, an exemplary case study of the kind of resistance to the West…
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…toke his shrinking base and served as a warning shot of his willingness to use his pardon powers, which may come into play as the Russia investigation proceeds. Yet the act is more than merely self-protection or self-promotion: Trump, in pardoning Arpaio, is emphasizing a counter-vision of both law and law enforcement. The pardon, “part and parcel of the president’s ongoing feud with federal judges who don’t rule as he’d like” signals “that the li…
Read More…Islamist factions. Morals police reportedly arrested men at a Cairo bathhouse on Sunday and accused them of “perversions.” A reporter for a pro-regime TV channel that instigated the raid gloated over the arrest and posted photographs of the men on Facebook. At the Guardian, Brian Whitaker examines the ways Egyptian governments have made political use out of anti-gay persecution, “even though homosexuality is not actually illegal in Egypt.” He rec…
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…to me it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use to—to use their religion to hurt others. It’s simply a factual statement followed by an anodyne opinion. I don’t think people should use their religion to hurt others, either. Does that make me a bigot? The broader point here is that Kennedy’s reasoning is simply incoherent. There is no way for government to remain “strictly neutral” when it comes to religious values. B…
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