Religion Dispatches
…anticism, is visible and very close to the surface of our celebration. Self-giving love is self-giving whether it is framed as passionately romantic or self-sacrificial. There is a rich poetic tradition that speaks of the martyrdom of all romantic love. We are called to give ourselves to the lover as one gives oneself to the god. Loss of self and self-fulfillment are twinned gestures and composite experiences. While often perceived simply as a hol…
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…rbation habit. And, on behalf of the school newspaper, he landed a rare one-on-one interview with Jerry Falwell himself. When Falwell died just before the semester’s end, Roose won the distinction of being the last print journalist to interview the former Moral Majority kingpin. Perhaps most miraculous of all, though: when Roose returned to campus after writing his book, he didn’t get clobbered. Nobody seemed to mind that he had been lying and spy…
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…y think about the Satanic Temple in and of itself, its very existence, self-understanding, and especially its religious tax-exempt status should make us wonder whether modernization dispels religion from the world or just makes it change shape. The authors of Beyond Doubt insist that we must fix our definition of religion in order to reliably measure changes in religiosity over time, but concepts don’t have fixed definitions in real life. They cha…
Read More…ex marriage were part of a “drive to neuter religion” being pushed by “well-financed, well-oiled sectors” of society, late last year on “Meet the Press” he simply asserted that the hierarchy had been “outmarketed” on the issue. And in March he said, “Good for him,” when questioned about football player Michael Sam coming out as gay. Despite Dolan’s rhetorical tune-up, he’s no longer the “go-to” American cardinal for the Vatican, says Otterman, as…
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…, while an early August poll has Clinton with a slight lead. While Trump’s numbers are dropping almost everywhere—a recent poll indicated Clinton has grabbed a four percent lead in Georgia, for example—the Utah numbers invite further investigation. In Slate, historian Max Perry Mueller provided critical insight last week contextualizing Trump’s poor standing among Mormons within the LDS Church’s long history as victims of religious persecution and…
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…nch Supporter, Trump and Harris argued over who has the more impressive pro-Israel bonafides. Neither candidate answered the question about what they would do to stop the plausible genocide. Both held true to the establishment position because, if there’s an industry that’s running out of cash it’s defense contractors, right? And you may not agree with me. You might say: “what’s all this got to do with you, you don’t get a say!” But if you listene…
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…l investigation produced substantial evidence specifically implicating then-Cardinal Ratzinger in the Church’s criminal cover-ups. What pedophilic priests have done over the years is a moral horror. That the hierarchy of the church has too often been more concerned about protecting its reputation than about mitigating this horror is a grievous offense. And I think there is evidence to suggest that Ratzinger may have made decisions that were motiva…
Read More…ng urbane, globally-minded moderates as it is of producing Cleon-Skousenite-Tea-Party ideologues. (Not to mention a few liberals.) And that would be a welcome reminder indeed. Years ago, a high-ranking LDS Church official was reported to have compared working with Elder Boyd K. Packer to trying to “stage manage a grizzly bear.” In October 2010, after Elder Packer delivered a highly controversial and bruising talk on LGBT issues at the Church’s glo…
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…k. Although we think of her as “Mexican-American,” she is actually “Mexican-Lebanese-American.” Her ancestors left Lebanon in the late 19th or early 20th century in search of a better life, as did The Prophet’s author Kahlil Gibran. Gibran came to the U.S. 1895, at age 12, with his mother, two sisters and brother. Hayek, who is 47, has said that she was first introduced to The Prophet as a child by her grandfather. Like Hayek, Gibran spent most of…
Read More…rvative, though they don’t share the religious or moral objections of Judeo-Christian-Islamic countries. But across a region becoming steadily more urban and cosmopolitan, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people (LGBT) communities are experiencing a changes in attitudes and a greater legal recognition that echoes the trend in the West towards much greater acceptance of equality…. South Korea is something of an outlier in the region: Conserva…
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