Religion Dispatches
…le churchgoing and religious belief are the highest in the nation — making African American communities the most unwaveringly religious in the U.S. At the same time, African American communities are among the most economically and racially disenfranchised; in the U.S., African Americans are still disproportionately poor, under-educated and over-incarcerated. Black incarceration rates and black homelessness parallel each other. And for all of the s…
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…reduced to 500 million people within a century huddling near the North and South Poles with the rest of the planet scorched and uninhabitable. Stephen Hawkings sees our plight as hopeless and urges plans to migrate into space. Is There Any Hope? Hopeful scientists like Johann Rockstrom say we have the technical genius (shown by dramatic advances in renewable energy and agriculture in countries like Holland, Germany, and Scandinavia) to extend life…
Read More…an Mathewson and I’m Assistant Professor of Religion at Wofford College in South Carolina. Like many people, I have been following with interest the fallout of the Fort Hood shootings, and particularly the ways that media figures (journalists, television personalities, etc.) have linked—or refused to link—Nidal Hasan’s actions with his Muslim faith. It is for this reason that I read with interest your recent post in the Atlantic, “When Muslims Com…
Read More…r deepest and sincere apology for the behavior of Rev. Nancy Taylor of Old South Church, UCC and the UCC related Church of the Covenant. They do not reflect the heart and mind of our United Church of Christ whose premise is ‘that all may be one.’ Those of us who truly value the unity of all Christians and treasure our ecumenical relationships with you as Catholic brothers and sisters in Christ are grieved.” The Confessing Movement UCC pastor also…
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…er dinner. The father, in this particular family, grew up on a hog farm in South Georgia where Easter dinner is a feast, including ham, biscuits, chicken and dumplings, and many kinds of pie. It’s the kind of country cooking common in Southern farm kitchens. From the moment they walk in the door, all of the food is permissible and stays permissible until they return home. Other families decide that Easter dinner will be Kosher for Passover, with l…
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…y’s 36%. That’s a tiny margin for Gingrich, and smaller than his margin in South Carolina, where he won 44% of evangelicals, who made up 65% of the electorate there. How far Romney will go in adopting the Gingrich religion message remains to be seen. Most voters I’ve talked to here in Florida said they’d vote for Romney in the general election, even if they believed him to be insufficiently conservative. Their antipathy toward Obama—an antagonism…
Read More…s LGBT community. “The crackdown has echoes of a roundup of gay men in the southern Russian region of Chechnya this year, many of whom were detained and tortured,” writes The Guardian’s Shaun Walker. It was not immediately clear what prompted the Baku raids, or what the authorities’ end goal might be. The topic of homosexuality is taboo in conservative Azerbaijani society, and last year’s ILGA-Europe Rainbow Index ranked it the worst place in Euro…
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…United States is now one of only eight countries—including Afghanistan and South Sudan—where the maternal mortality rate is actually increasing. These numbers are even bleaker for women of color in the U.S., where black women are four times more likely than white women to die in childbirth. The pervasive health disparities among communities of color can be traced back, in part, to a long legacy of reproductive coercion. In 2003, the Institute of M…
Read More…In Iowa, evangelical voters favored Santorum; in New Hampshire, Romney; in South Carolina, Gingrich—even after a convention of evangelical social conservatives endorsed Rick Santorum in Dallas on January 17. And the strength of the anti-Mormonism narrative is likely to fade as the race heads out west into regions where more voters are able to moderate their judgments of Mormonism with actual contact with LDS people. In Nevada, it is estimated that…
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…ter Easter, the Trump White House hosted the annual Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn. Described by the White House as a “timeless tradition dating back to 1878” the event has been held most years since the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes, and has grown to be the largest public event held at the White House. The Trumps’ first Easter Egg Roll in 2017 was poorly planned and thrown together hastily, by a First Lady who was likely still adjustin…
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