Religion Dispatches
…magination,” he writes. Elsewhere, two titans of Theravada Buddhism in the United States have found themselves at loggerheads over their differing views about defensive war. In one of the final issues of the progressive Buddhist journal Inquiring Mind, released in the middle of last year, monk and translator Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi (who also attended the White House meeting) courted controversy with an article entitled “War and Peace: A Buddhist Perspe…
Read More…of September 11 can be traced to some basic consequences of something the United States, as a political entity, did. For Falwell it was secularizing the public square and legalizing abortion. For Wright, it was supporting state terrorism and using atomic weapons. To be sure, Falwell was widely criticized for his remarks, and issued a rather tepid apology. But he certainly was not repudiated or renounced by leading Republicans. To the contrary, Jo…
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…effective judicial sanction to a Republican coup d’etat; however, Citizens United is not merely court-sanctioned, but court-engineered, amounting to a judicial coup d’etat executed in behalf of the already-ascendant money power in our society. Noting that this ruling will likely benefit Republicans much more than Democrats is really beside the point; the point—the well-sharpened and deadly point—is that Citizens United will vastly strengthen the h…
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…the increasing loss of Protestant control of sexual mores and laws in the United States. The legalization of polygamy would only mark the next step in the decoupling of church and state with regard to matrimony. But Sprigg does not rest his case against polygamy (and same-sex marriage) on religious liberty claims alone. He banks on conservative gay activist Jonathan Rauch’s case against polygamy to stress the social harms of polygamy. After summa…
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…to be held accountable for their racism. Too many people are hearing this coded rhetoric and deciding that the real problem with the economy must be folks of color, immigrants, and the Jews.” During the last period of Patriot and militia growth in the mid-1990s, Ward witnessed this coded racist rhetoric being tested in the margins of the right-wing media, though it has since moved into the mainstream. In the past year I’ve interviewed dozens of a…
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…hat most Americans would prefer to live in a friendlier, more humane, more united country; I certainly would. But there can be no cheap or easy unity in a country torn apart by an increasingly fascist Right. Troublingly, establishment Democrats like Biden seem unwilling to hear that comity with unreconstructed bigots will only legitimize and empower them in their authoritarian lust for power, causing severe harm to—to use a biblical turn of phrase…
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…re matter, are members of the LGBTQ community? How serious can Black LGBTQ United Methodists take this new initiative that doesn’t contain a clear stance against homophobia and transphobia? Have our denominational leaders not yet learned Black Lives Matter means ALL Black Lives Matter, including members of the LGBTQ community? It was not too long ago that many of us sought to make this point at the denomination’s 2016 General Conference. About 150…
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…red concerns. One might say Obama offered a new way of mapping life in the United States, one that privileged shared territory as opposed to the outlaying areas of exclusion and radical difference. He noted this approach over and over again. And perhaps we heard this offer and found it appealing in light of the eight years of flat and unimaginative politics that preceded him. Yet, I am not convinced that we recognized the ramifications of this “tr…
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…s constituencies of the LDS, Seventh-day Adventist, Assemblies of God, and United Pentecostal Church International outnumber the domestic membership of these quintessentially American denominations. As globalizing churches they can ill afford to remain captive inside Fortress America; as pilgrim churches they remind all Americans of our time as sojourners and of the enduring value of hospitality. Their histories and religious texts offer examples…
Read More…rial cooperation agreements, recognizing the ordinations of ministers within the other denominations. “It’s almost like dominoes,” Adee said, “It used to be the exception, but it’s becoming the rule. The pressure is now on the United Methodists.” Currently, the United Methodist Church allows gay and lesbian ministers, but only if they are celibate and not open about their sexual orientation. “This is an ethical challenge and an invitation,” Adee s…
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