Religion Dispatches
…y refreshing. All of my previous books had been set mostly in Colorado and Texas, but I had lived in Massachusetts for decades, and my brother, Don Stinson, a landscape painter, suggested that I write a book set in the east. So, I was looking around, and it was literally the landscape, the earth in the cemetery with its small rises and falls, graves and markers, that led me to Jonathan Edwards and other people in Northampton in that time. He’s n…
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…nd publicity, or marry off little girls to old men. Instead, just like any number of secular polyamorists, many polygamists can and do pass for conventional Americans—and have argued that they deserve the right to be treated as such. Friday evening, a federal judge announced that he agreed with them. Judge Clark Waddoups of the United States District Court in Utah issued a 91-page decision in a lawsuit filed by Kody Brown, who, with his four wives…
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…conian legislation that’s come down from states like Kansas, North Dakota, Texas and Mississippi. The fact that abortion and birth control policies continue to be hijacked by the extreme right is an atrocity, as is the destructive whitewash of the devastating impact of climate change. I believe that legal abortion and universal access to contraception are human rights—period. Women of color have the most to lose from the increasing crackdown on an…
Read More…rcée, single mother, cabaret singer), the little Jewish girl from Houston, Texas was profiled by everyone from Psychology Today to the New York Times. Some stories zeroed in on Williamson’s celebrity connections (BFFs with Oprah Winfrey and David Geffen, officiating at one of Liz Taylor’s weddings) while others sniggered at her “New Age teachings.” But few mentioned the social activism that had been a continuous thread through her career. That act…
Read More…-sex weddings, particularly if the Supreme Court goes the way of a growing number of district courts (including today in Texas) and strikes down same-sex marriage bans as unconstitutional? I asked Caroline Mala Corbin, a First Amendment expert at the University of Miami School of Law, who told me, “Given that churches have long been able to discriminate against women without losing their tax exempt status, it seems highly unlikely that they risk l…
Read More…Africa as the most homophobic. Countries in Africa are, in fact, guilty of sanctioning detestable pieces of anti-gay legislation, but such is true of many others. We are all complicit. In the US, for example, it was only 11 years ago that the Supreme court reversed Lawrence v. Texas, finally invalidating the criminalization of sodomy in the 14 remaining states that maintained such laws. And as of today, same-sex couples in 36 states in the US are…
Read More…President George W. Bush keynoted the MJBI’s annual fundraiser in Irving, Texas, generating controversy in the American Jewish community. Jonathan Bernis, a prominent Messianic Jew and president of Jewish Voice ministries, is chair of the MJBI, and serves on Promise Keepers’ board of directors. At the 2012 fundraiser for MJBI, which was keynoted by Glenn Beck, Bernis claimed “our numbers are growing and growing,” because “the Bible predicted that…
Read More…in the Ethiopian private press that frequently publishes interviews of Dr. Antonious Seyoum and articles allegedly sponsored by him. Antonious is head of an NGO named United for Life, which is widely believed to be funded by American Evangelicals in contravention of Ethiopian laws restricting foreign finance on policy advocacy activities. Lebanon: Court Rules Against Anti-Gay Law The Daily Star of Lebanon reported this week on a legal ruling it sa…
Read More…finding a goat with a numerologically significant ear tag). Growing up in Texas, I once had the misfortune of getting into a conversation with a Renaissance Faire enthusiast whose hobby was blacksmithing his own swords. He told me how he tested a particularly heavy blade by decapitating his neighbor’s goat. “And the newspaper,” he boasted, “listed it as cult activity!” The point of this story is that people sometimes do leave goat heads in strang…
Read More…tention rates of irreligiosity are very high. In particular, University of Texas-Pan American sociologist Stephen Merino, in a 2012 paper, “Irreligious Socialization? The Adult Religious Preferences of Individuals Raised with No Religion,” found that “those with religiously unaffiliated parents as children are significantly less likely to express a religious preference as adults.” Indeed Merino, using data from the General Social Survey, found tha…
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