Religion Dispatches
…ns of the brain that remain unactivated in the rest of us. There are any number of weird implications and outright contradictions in these sorts of studies. The first is this: do the authors of these studies believe that religious belief or practice has the power to effect the size of the human brain? If so, that would seem to grant an astonishing power to religion to effect real world, and very nearly miraculous changes. Or perhaps the claim i…
Read More…Bergoglio noted disapprovingly in a 2007 speech. Meanwhile, an astounding number of women in Argentina, women without access to or education about contraception, die annually as victims of botched abortion procedures carried out in secret. If we do dig a little deeper into Bergoglio’s past, we find that he was accused of participating in one of the numerous human rights violations committed during Argentina’s Dirty War (which ended up resulting…
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…nvited people to sit down, so that they were not standing or congregating around windows. And then you work your best to keep people calm. And there was a point where these white supremacists surrounded the church, correct? Right, right. Could you hear them? Were they chanting? They were chanting down the sidewalks and what-not. But during the church service, you couldn’t hear anything. At some point, there were lots of bright lights outside that…
Read More…have the greatest concentration of white supremacists in America), I met a number of Christian pastors and activists. Afterwards, a conservative evangelical told me he felt that Islamophobia and Christophobia were similar (I guess it’s better than denying bigotry exists at all). I also received an e-mail from a participant in the event who came by because of RD: Dear Haroon, Thanks for your talk at WSU tonight and [for] your perspective on things….
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…o longstanding concerns among the Quiverfull movement) should be fought by tripling the child tax deduction to encourage larger families. “We need to be a hopeful country that wants more children,” Santorum declared. “We’ve had other countries coming to our doorstep asking us to please let their people know that they need to have more children, because their death rates are outnumbering their births rates, and they’re in crisis,” Michelle Duggar t…
Read More…to become better organized as a political force, even as they increase in number. The major impediment to that kind of organization is the fact that it is very difficult for secularists to conceive of themselves in tribal terms. Most tribes, whether of nations or ethnicities or sports fandom, can easily demarcate their membership—it’s the people who look like us, or talk like us, or dress like us. Tribes organized around religious belief have rit…
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…stions of difference loomed that day, and much of the discussion centered around the idea that not only do we have, surprisingly, a lot in common—an important point worth remembering and repeating in a culture that frequently lifts up conflict while ignoring harmony—but that we also carry profoundly important and seemingly irreconcilable differences. In that sense, the conference left me (and I suspect many others) with as many questions as answer…
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…he one thing that they got right in this case. The U.S. has on the books a number of valuable laws against discrimination in the workplace, and all organizations (businesses, nonprofits, schools, governments) are expected to abide by these laws. Except religions, or so it now seems. According to the Tabor ruling, religious groups get a pass on the law when it comes to employees who are considered “ministerial.” The right to the free exercise of re…
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…that it could have a bigger tent if it stopped playing to such a narrow base. One day, sooner or later, I’m sure they’ll see the benefit in that. For now, both Romney and Gingrich, and the Republican establishment, would do well to note that there is an increasing number of Arab and Muslim Americans. They are not one and the same. But, they are politically active, eager to vote, and often donate time and money to candidates and campaigns. They are…
Read More…out which they themselves hadn’t a clue. Then there was Suzanne Kessler’s groundbreaking article in the feminist journal Signs about intersexed and ambiguously-sexed infants and the extraordinary efforts of doctors to hide these problems by correcting them in all possible haste, even if they weren’t clear which gender ought to be assigned. Since then, we have become increasingly knowledgeable about the complexities of sexuality and gender. One…
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