Religion Dispatches
…olleague Hussein Rashid pointed out in this must-read piece), Mormons, the number two most disliked religion in America, have no business contributing to public rage against the number one most disliked religion in America. Nor in trafficking in falsehoods like “Islam is an ideology, not a religion,” a line I’ve been hearing from a few Mormons in recent days. Islam is in fact a religion for which Mormon leaders from the time of George A. Smith…
Read More…small number of Christians who turn up to protest against Pride have been vastly outnumbered by the Christians participating in it. Hill also noted religious support in the UK last April for a new law “to allow religious elements in civil partnerships, while last year the Quakers became the first major Christian denomination to resolve to carry out same-sex marriages.” Even here in the United States, the trend toward full acceptance of gays and l…
Read More…Having a husband meant that they could not give their ultimate all for the number one man on most African-American womens’ lips, and it’s not Denzel. It’s Jesus. For many women in churches like COGIC, being in love with Jesus means that most other men, whether desirable as a husband or not, stood in the way of the number one relationship. One person I interviewed even had a name for it: “being loosed” from your husband to do the Lord’s work. “Bein…
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…ts, and little in the way of mandated penalties. In the twentieth century, various Islamic revivalist movements, particularly within Sunni Islam, seeking to be traditional or authentic have tended to call for the death penalty for male homosexual acts. They claim this is the Islamic position. This obscures historical as well as contemporary differences of interpretation within Islam and across very different Muslim-majority countries. Still, the d…
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…is a professor of sociology at Wellesley College and research fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Harvard’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, where she co-directs The Transnational Studies Initiative. Laurie Maffly-Kipp is the Archer Alexander Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work examines religious contact zones of the 19th century, a time whe…
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…ve remained sketchy. During the post-Civil Rights Movement period, a large number and variety of U.S.-based hate groups and “patriot” groups emerged, with known hate groups numbering 537 by the mid-1990s alongside 858 “patriot” groups (including militia groups, common law courts, and political or citizens groups) totaling more than a million members. Also by the mid-1990s there were reported to be more than 2,000 hate group web sites, 150,000 to 2…
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…ok: who is the intended audience? I suspect Stroop and O’Neal want other exvangelicals and Nones to find some consolation in knowing they’re not alone. That’s an important thing to understand, and a big reason why Stroop’s #EmptyThePews and Blake Chastain’s #exvangelical hashtags went as viral as they did. But clergy, who stand to benefit most from this book, might not be as likely to pick it up based on the title alone. And that’s a shame, becaus…
Read More…s remained fairly steady in recent decades is “the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants to the U.S.,” which has masked “the large number of people who have left the Catholic church.” According to Pew, approximately one-third of those raised Catholic have left the church and 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics. If you were a business losing one-third of your customers, wouldn’t you want to make some changes? Sur…
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…ntionally out-of-step with the modern world. On the other side we have the Vatican Library and the Vatican Museums, eminently modern institutions that have drunk deeply from the well of modern ideas. Museums, and the libraries that birthed them, are modern institutions, after all. These places—the Church, versus the Library or Museums—can seem like entirely different worlds, these days. I’ll have something to say about the Library here, and will h…
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…rope where anti-trans hatred thrives. Just last week, the well-known conservative, yet still “respectable,” German newspaper, Die Welt, escalated the mainstreaming of right-wing talking points. A number of researchers wrote an op-ed, in which they accused the ARD and ZDF, the independent, state-funded TV news stations (the German version of the BBC) of “indoctrinating” kids with “gender ideology” in order to sexualize and “re-educate” them. The ar…
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