Religion Dispatches
…ive our lives from a place of Holy integrity and love that has an organic authority of its own. It’s that integrity that will let us know when to speak and act, and when to walk away. Jesus says when you’ve tried your best—you’ve made your best arguments against the powers that be, in love, and they still don’t get it, let them know, in no uncertain terms, that you have zero fucks left to give. Wipe the dust off your feet. …
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…ly rejected the claim that allowing trans folks to use the facilities that best match their gender identity leads to any increase in reports of harassment or assault in such spaces. It just doesn’t work that way. In fact, if anyone has anything to fear it should be transgender people since they’re actually more likely than their cisgender peers to be harassed and assaulted in sex-segregated spaces like bathrooms and locker rooms. And with high-pro…
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…h a rabid culture warrior like Mike Pence in the #2 role. But probably the best evidence for somebody like this would be the ICE raids in Mississippi last week. Here’s Trump the authoritarian carrying out his promise to keep them safe—and the result is a terrorized, deflated community. People notice that kind of thing, especially when their church is called on to assist the victims. And it may never work! All the evidence indicates that there’s a…
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…friends, especially those who aren’t connected to parishes, to keep their phones open. At their last meeting in June 2021, the US Catholic Bishops did not discuss the Synod at all, even though they knew it was scheduled to start four months later. They’ve set aside a full forty-five minutes on the agenda of their November 2021 meeting to discuss what’s promoted as the most life-changing process for the Catholic community worldwide since Vatican I…
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…olina, and Wisconsin? They’re all right around the national average. Those numbers are not destiny, however. Conservative Utah has low levels of agreement with Christian nationalism, at just 28%. Meanwhile its solidly Democratic neighbor New Mexico is a bit higher, at 32%. Still, the results are significant for understanding the political scene today. Christian nationalism should not be ignored or downplayed, but at the same time the segment of th…
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…g to take. The social review by the team is highly subjective, even in the best scenarios. Since donated organs are a scarce resource, the goal is often to find the best host (recipient) for the organ so that it does not go to waste. In that environment, organs tend to go to people who can have a full-time caregiver, has family who will help with care, doesn’t take personal risks, and has a medical history of doing what doctors tell them to do. Al…
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…ve. Neurotribes documents how selective, “pyramid” thinking has fostered a number of dangerous theories about autism. It tells the story of Bernard Rimland, a widely-read author who took up a comprehensive review of autism research in 1958 when his son was diagnosed with the syndrome. He was so committed to the hope of a simple cure, however, that he latched onto the theory that autism was the result of a simple glitch in a single metabolic pathwa…
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…Leave it to TheCall to make love sound alarming, even terrifying. But the best was yet to come, and his name was Kamal. Kamal was the reason we were here (and awake). I didn’t know who Kamal was, and would only later learn his identity, although while he was speaking, I suspected he was a fraud. (I’m not the only one who finds Kamal Saleem dubious). Kamal introduced himself as an ex-terrorist, which usually makes me wonder, considering how others…
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…and 1940s work of French Catholic personalist intellectuals and on the spread of “human dignity” in Western European constitutions, beginning with the 1937 Christian Democratic constitution of Ireland, Moyn concludes that “through this lost and misremembered transwar era, it is best to see human rights as a project of the Christian right for the most part, not the secular left.” Is the advancement of human rights in the 1940s best seen as a proje…
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…ches.” Well, yes and no. It’s a party that gives Elizabeth Warren a microphone even as it dispatches Rahm Emanuel to make nice with the very same fat cats Warren denounces; that lurches to proclaim Jerusalem the one and only capital of Israel even when it knows how catastrophically wrongheaded this is to the cause of justice and peace in the Middle East; that is quite obviously afraid to talk candidly about grinding poverty in America for fear o…
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