Religion Dispatches
…their hands and plotting their comeback. A debate about the future of the Republican Party and the role of the religious right within it will commence. If the McCain/Palin ticket goes down to defeat, the blame game will predominate—at least at first. Then the questioning will begin: Did the nomination of the Alaska governor help or hurt the ticket? Did playing solely to the base—religious conservatives in particular—limited the ticket’s appeal? D…
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…tarian matriarchs, such as Dorothy Kelley Patterson, who with her husband, Paige Patterson, created the homemaking degree and curriculum introduced at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2007 and P. Bunny Wilson, author of anti-feminist Christian books such as Liberated Through Submission. In her introduction to the collection, DeMoss wrote of her culture-transforming ambitions: I began to wonder what might happen in our day if even a sma…
Read More…h as old man Kohler, poured still more resources into the fight—ultimately paying a relatively small number of strikers the then-unheard-of sum of $12 million in union strike benefits. The union had won an overwhelming victory. But within a decade Kohler was shipping the work to new non-union facilities in the South. Just last year the current magnate—yet another Herbert Kohler—pushed through a greatly weakened contract for the small number of Loc…
Read More…red to fill out a form stating them. In the short run it’s likely that the number of employers who seek to duck the contraceptive mandate will be small. But imagine a scenario where a larger number of employers seeks to escape a costly mandate, such as equal access to in vitro fertilization procedures for straight and gay couples, for supposedly religious reasons and hundreds flood HHS with generic opt-out letters that don’t identify a specific in…
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…tion the punishment for homosexuality may be death. Nigeria: Police arrest participants at same-sex couple’s wedding ceremony The Daily Trust reported on Wednesday that a male couple’s wedding ceremony was interrupted by police who arrested the couple and other participants. Under Nigeria’s anti-gay law a person who enters into a same-sex marriage or civil union is punishable by 14 years in prison. Church of England: Bishop says marriage doctrine…
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In 1970, at the age of four, I left Pakistan and came to Canada with my parents. At that time, there were less than 34,000 Muslims in all of Canada. By 2001, this number had grown to 579,600. While the population of Muslims grew tremendously in North America, we were almost absent from the array of characters portrayed on television. When I was a child, Hadji from reruns of the animated show Johnny Quest, was the only Muslim I could identify on t…
Read More…r of fund raising projects, including an “Adopt a Clitoris” campaign and a number of partnerships with companies that make vibrators. This funding was used to recruit and fund a team of surgeons (who are not Raelians) and to establish a “pleasure hospital” in Burkina Faso. There is some controversy as to what percentage of women who undergo the surgery will be able to experience orgasms as Clitoraid, claims. But so far, Clitoraid has received much…
Read More…on it a number of conservative advocacy groups, think tanks, links to the Republican Party, conservative philanthropy funded organizations, and media outfits, and includes Americans for Fair Taxation, Americans for Hope, Growth & Opportunity, the Discovery Institute, the Federalist Society, the Manhattan Institute, L. Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committe…
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…learn for class when it’s applied to a bird, but here’s a disease that was passed down to me genetically from my parents. Here’s a disease introduced into the population by way of a protective allele (if you have two ‘bad’ copies of the sickle-cell gene, you are very sickly and tend to die young, but the original mutation has stuck around because those with one bad copy of the gene, like myself, are known as a ‘carriers.’ You are sick, but not too…
Read More…upsurge. At the same time that anti-gay violence is growing in Africa, the number of African Christians, including Roman Catholics, continues to increase. Catholics now comprise twenty percent of the population of the entire continent, or 185 million people. It would, of course, be unfair to blame increasing anti-gay violence in Africa entirely, or even primarily, on the Roman Catholic Church, given the pivotal roles played in this crisis by some…
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