Religion Dispatches
…soul) damned.” To be lost is not merely a geographic problem for marooned airline passengers, or for men unwilling to stop and ask for directions—it’s a spiritual and moral condition. These days a google search turns up over 500,000,000 hits (that’s half a billion); not too surprising for a basic and often-used term. Similar numerical results come from google searches on terms like “run” and “hide.” Meanwhile, “found” yields over 1.3 trillion hit…
Read More…h ultra-Orthodox men interfering in your travel, you can just take another airline. If only it were as easy for female employees affected by the numerous lawsuits against the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage requirement to find a better job. *Correction: This post originally indicated that gender separation was due to concerns about women’s menstrual cycles. To read more about gender separation among Haredi Jews in Israel and in the U….
Read More…an ad in a local shop or community center. Last minute emergency? Call the airline right away to see about possibilities for accommodating your needs. Likewise, if one is ardently anti-abortion for moral reasons, rather than only focus on making it illegal, prevent it by limiting unwanted pregnancies: help ensure adequate, healthy sex education and contraception are available to those who need or want them. Work to make affordable, quality prenata…
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…eo-Nazi groups are among those who reportedly took part in the protests. A number of people were injured during the clashes. Activists also claimed they were attacked by religious groups on the street who accused them of pedophilia and used homophobic slurs against them. The Chilean LGBTI movement has held public demonstrations for nearly two decades, but Monday’s clashes are the first time the police have made arrests at them. Representatives of…
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…faithful to stand for something,” says the Rev. Michael Kirby, a pastor in Chicago, so organizers returned to an approach of offering replacement wording instead of simple deletion. The language considered by the presbyteries two years ago came closest to passing, but after many opponents felt it was not rigorous enough it fell short by just nine presbyteries. The new language, sent to the presbyteries for ratification by the General Assembly in…
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…the sticker test to 1,170 kids at schools in six cities—Amman, Cape Town, Chicago, Guangzhou, Istanbul, and Toronto. “Altruism was calculated as the number of stickers shared out of 10,” they write. The researchers also gave the kids another test, in which they watched videos of people hurting other people, and then judged (a) how mean the bullies were, and (b) how much punishment the bullies deserved. Then Decety and his collaborators went to th…
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…h was celebrating the morning’s “big win.” An appeals court had ruled that Illinois pharmacists were permitted to refuse to distribute Plan B emergency contraception if it interfered with their religious beliefs. The audience cheered the news and settled in for the day’s events. Fighting back tears, Dr. Anthony Levatino, a former abortion provider who’d performed second-trimester abortions until the tragic death of his daughter, recalled how, afte…
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…n taught students both “the Christian and American way of life.” Nearby at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute, the president informed one donor in 1947 that MBI taught “the old-fashioned kind of Americanism.” Perhaps most famously, the fundamentalist stalwart Bob Jones University clung to the notion that evangelical values were conservative patriotic values and vice versa. Second-generation leader Bob Jones Jr., for example, told audiences in the 196…
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…olor further calls into question the use of this abusive practice.” As the numbers have grown, so have the numbers of critics, Wired reports, citing a series of “scathing reports and documentaries” released in 2012 by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. That same year, the US Senate held its first-ever hearings on…
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…ist Graham briefly became pastor of small congregation in Western Springs, Illinois, and, at the invitation of Torrey Johnson, hosted a weekly radio program, Songs in the Night. Shortly thereafter, Johnson recruited Graham to preach at Saturday-night rallies in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, part of the outreach for a new organization called Youth for Christ. In 1946, Graham joined the staff of Youth for Christ, where he met and befriended Charles Temp…
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