Religion Dispatches
…whole thing to get his main point: the ideal of sola scriptura is insufficient when it comes to providing the basis of faith. T takes the argument in the direction of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. You need experience to understand how God acts on a personal level in your life. It’s a fair point. There are other problems, though. Biblical literalism unnecessarily ties the hands of God in a couple of ways. For one, creationism limits understanding of…
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…uman life begins. But we can say with absolute certainty when humane treatment ends. Forcing a child to bring a pregnancy to term against her wishes and well-being is clearly inhumane. The bishops are the ones who need to ‘justify’ what moral standing they have to express an opinion, what ecclesial authority they possess to try to make their way normative. If they were to update their moral theology, they would learn that in postmodernity, when wo…
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…usion finds Jones seeking the Holy Grail to save his father/nation. In a sequence that rewrites the opening of Raiders, Jones must navigate through a boobytrapped enclosure, not with might and luck, but as a believing and well versed Christian Arthurian Knight. The narrative revolves around Jones’s reunion with his father, Jones Sr., a representative of American tradition, wisdom and knowledge—who is juxtaposed with book-burning Nazis. The rescue…
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…tics has been clearly on display for some time now. Trump and his evangelical allies didn’t invent it; they only exacerbated it. If evangelicalism ever wants to play a more positive role in social and political life, perhaps it’s time its leaders acknowledge that its public image isn’t a “grotesque caricature,” but the thing itself. There’s a weighty theological term and disposition for taking an approach that comes to terms with such hard truths…
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…e in relation to “incipient fascism” (which Charles Kaiser describes as “open encouragement of Nazis… a pardon without even pretending to go through the normal channels of the Justice Department,”) and even as an impeachable offense in its own right as a pardon “for willfully refusing to follow the Constitution and violating the rights of people inside the U.S.” As Northwestern University law professor Martha Reddish has argued, “the Fifth Amendme…
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…—as if conservative evangelicals experience theology and politics as fundamentally separate spheres. In fact, for conservative evangelicals, Christianity is essentially “total,” permeating and defining every other aspect of life—not something you do in private, or on Sundays. Here on RD, Daniel Miller has provided an important corrective to the notion of “politicized religion,” which implies that “real” religion is not politicized. As someone who…
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…dred sisters are in their 30s.) The concern for numbers is really, as subsequent materials from the investigators have shown, an entrée to looking at the lives, beliefs, and practices of women who strive to live coherently, melding their religious convictions with the needs of the world. Whether there are three nuns or three million is not the issue. What has changed (and the Vatican wishes hadn’t) is the fact that Catholic women, including nuns,…
Read More…ealth care reform, and Proposition 30 (a tax revenue measure aimed to keep California public schools from losing even more money). I’ve had less of an activist role since I left my church because that was the medium for my activism. Why did you take a public stance in support of marriage equality? And what was the fallout? I made this decision because I had members of my congregation who were gay and lesbian. They were part of our community so we…
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…olosi Jr, who, in 2018, founded the “Reintegrative Therapy Association” in California (a term he trademarked). Nicolosi Jr claims to have developed his father’s “treatment” such that it’s now able to heal childhood trauma by discussing “key” sexual fantasies, and that the resulting “shift” to heterosexuality is simply a “spontaneous byproduct.” But medical organizations and human rights projects list it as just another form of conversion therapy,…
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…d it’s not.” That’s how Tiffany Vasquez, a longtime resident of Roseville, California, feels after weeks of vicious right-wing attacks on the local LGBTQ community—attacks that are part of an increasingly hostile assault on the rights and dignity of queer, and especially trans, people taking place in many state legislatures, school board meetings, libraries hosting Drag Queen Story Hour events, and other venues nationwide. Vasquez, who is nonbinar…
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