Religion Dispatches
…on a weekly basis. Oh the conundrum when I became a scientist! As I became more and more aware of the other side of the story, I thought that it could have something going for it as well. Enter sickle-cell disease. The more I learned about the disease scientifically, the more it was hard to ignore the conversations about the very concept of natural selection condemned by my grandparents. It’s easy to dismiss a theory you have to learn for class wh…
Read More…eed secure their cause. And Christian and cultural conservatives hope a common bond of homophobia will ally their efforts with minority voters energized by an Obama candidacy. To be sure, the dominant evangelical orientation of the black church coupled with a large number of Catholic Latino voters may just provide the support Prop 8 needs—it has been said, “politics makes for strange bedfellows.” Yet I am hopeful that enough minority voters will v…
Read More…d that as he drove home from the border, Mr. Zodhiates tried to call a cellphone number registered to Liberty Counsel, an evangelical legal group. That cellphone number has sometimes been used by Mathew D. Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel, dean of the Liberty University Law School in Lynchburg, Va., and a leader of Ms. Miller’s defense team. The RICO filed by Jenkins includes information that RD readers learned last year from Sarah Posner’s…
Read More…e of these movements. As global capitalism began to make middle-class life more and more comfortable, something was needed shake people out of their settled religious ways. Human effort, to the point of imperilment of one’s own body, was required for someone to become a modern day saint. Elliot stirred many, as she told about the extreme measures the mission field required. Being a missionary—bringing the message of Jesus Christ to all nations—mig…
Read More…mmitment To “Compromise”: Those of us who have worked hard to find some common ground in this debate, to help forge some compromise that might let health-care reform proceed for the tens of millions of low-income families who desperately need it, are still trying to find some middle ground that both sides could live with (even if not happily)… Here, Wallis tries to portray himself as a prominent leader in a process of reconciliation, rather than a…
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…map (as compiled by Salatomatic, an Islamic guide to mosques) compiled the number of mosques per state, while the second, using U.S. Department of State data, charts the number of refugees arriving in each state (from October 2014-July 2015), and the third offers “a compilation of Islamic terror activity by state” pairing the names of organizations with U.S. cities (for instance, Boca Raton, Florida, is flagged for “Al Qaeda”). The source for this…
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…tions—pushing not just the familiar list of Christian right demands, but a more subtle, and more thorough, transformation of Christian family life and structure, from which to wage a more effective culture war. The imperative of such a return to “biblical” gender roles is even farther- reaching though, as Kassian explained. Feminism, she argued, in a paraphrase of the argument in her book The Feminist Mistake: The Radical Impact of Feminism on Chu…
Read More…W chief Walter Reuther, every bit as tough 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 weak…
Read More…the Holy Father is successfully displaying a different, and I would argue more effective, model of evangelization. There are other issues the bishops might wish to attend to, such as climate change, or the on-going challenge of immigration, or creating greater solidarity with our Latin American brothers and sisters, or examining the ways our own U.S. economy creates a society of exclusion of the kind Pope Francis has denounced, or how they intend…
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…protesters who had gathered in the plaza de Armas for a “kisses against homophobia” demonstration. Sin Etiquetas, a Lima-based LGBT website, also shared numerous photos of same-sex couples kissing and holding hands in the street before police moved in with armoured trucks. George Liendo of Promsex, a Peruvian LGBT rights group, said members of his organisation took part in the protest. “The aggression was excessive towards the young people who ga…
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