Religion Dispatches
…belongs to a Church that strictly prohibits tobacco use, apparently had no reservations about promoting tobacco in countries which had no or few regulations on the promotion or use of tobacco products. In fact, the documents show that this was the clear objective of American tobacco companies who were facing declining sales at home due to increased government regulations and scrutiny. Romney has spoken of his personal disdain for tobacco, revealin…
Read More…entury church completing an aggressive transition from regionally-specific American theocracy to a global institution. It’s a transition that has costs, very human ones, as Mormons concerned with the status of LGBT members, or women, or with growing rates of disaffiliation among young people will tell you. Recent surveys of Church members have linked rising rates of youth disaffiliation to increased internet access and information about thorny his…
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…book whose lead characters are almost all Arabs and Muslims. Do you think American readers can go for that? Do you think it will be easy to make the readers identify with peoples who are usually ignored, misunderstood, or often even disliked? I’m pretty optimistic. I think the premise is intriguing enough to overcome whatever initial reservations some readers might have, and once they get into the story I think they’ll find the characters easy en…
Read More…ical conservatives. Will the Republican Party allow a particular strand of American religious antagonism to choose its presidential candidates, even when the evangelical right fails to deliver candidates the rest of the nation finds credible or electable? Could Mitt Romney’s modest but principled stand signal a turning point for the acceptability of openly anti-Mormon sentiment within the GOP? I’ve seen a few other signs this week that suggest i…
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…This is welcome. He is correct that based on his history many of his Latin American colleagues fear that he will not make doctrinal changes. Authoritarianism is not simply how one treats people, but also how one treats ideas. Second, the compassion, humanity, and simple lifestyle that Pope Francis manifests is refreshing after decades of John Paul II and Benedict XVI’s personalities and actions. At the same time, Francis demonstrates in the inter…
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…g children. This a largely pro-choice country at heart—even those who have reservations about abortion are firmly and consistently in favor of options that include family planning, contraception, and sexuality education, and in favor of women making decisions with dignity and minimal governmental interference. Insurance coverage for pregnancy termination has had a low profile until now because it was not threatened. Now that it is, it’s critical t…
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…e.” As Hannah Arendt describes in her masterful analysis of the history of American political philosophy On Revolution, the centrality of the Mayflower Compact in American culture emerged not just from its ability to bring people together, but from its role in establishing a tradition of voluntary covenants aimed at overcoming fear: The really astounding fact in the whole story is that their obvious fear of one another was accompanied by the no le…
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…anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more famil…
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…e “big three” advocacy organizations—the Freedom from Religion Foundation, American Atheists, and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State—and commented on the increasing diversification of the secular movement, as a result of which “the movement has seen a more intersectional approach.” To be sure, movement atheism has long been dominated by cisgender white men, and much work remains to be done both in terms of diversifying leaders…
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…Jesus isn’t messiah material for religious Jews. So, at first glance, that number seems staggeringly high. A full third? Once you delve into the numbers, though, 34% doesn’t seem quite so high. Really, Pew has asked an excellent question—a question that reveals the full tangle of ambiguities and inconsistencies that surround the topic of Jewish identity. First, some background: when the researchers at Pew set out to conduct this survey, they quick…
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