Religion Dispatches
…ans losing their lives at the hands of hasty harvesters; even a very small number would be too high. But I had a hard time summoning any outrage. In the end I learned much more from Kagan—ironically because his aims are in a way more modest. He wants to convince you of his physicalist stance; however, he doesn’t want to tell you how to reconcile with death. That part is up to you. So maybe it’s not a question of how to live with the fact of our mo…
Read More…with “corrective rape” and murder of lesbians on the 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,…
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…de against Albanian Kosovars in the late 1990s. The fact is, a significant number of Serbs, and even a large number of others from traditionally Orthodox backgrounds, continue to harbor a great deal of anger about Western intervention in the Kosovo War, which they see as a failure by the West to comprehend the historical role-reversal that’s taken place, including the persecution of Orthodox Christians by Albanians and other majority-Muslim ethnic…
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…them and for everyone around them. The good news here is that significant numbers of the hesitant and resistant respond to faith-based approaches. And although PRRI estimates that about 13% of all Americans are “generally agreeable to QAnon theories,” those same people respond the best to those approaches. The study names six such techniques: A religious leader encouraging vaccine acceptance A religious leader getting a vaccine Religious communit…
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…by the Al Qassam Brigades). Yousef Munayyer provides some history of the numbers from Gaza at Open Zion: For example, in 2011, the projectiles fired by the Israeli military into Gaza have been responsible for the death of 108 Palestinians, of which 15 where women or children, and the injury of 468 Palestinians, of which 143 where women or children. The methods by which these causalities were inflicted by Israeli projectiles breaks down as follow…
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…s a phrase that’s likely to bring to mind images of a kind of Father Knows Best arrangement. It isn’t difficult to understand why the PCUSA might adopt this rhetoric to affirm the position of its fairly sizable number of dissenting presbyteries, but is it really accurate? The word “tradition” tends to connote a sense of fixity and stability, an impression that “this is the way marriage always was,” leaving “gay marriage” to represent a sharp and d…
Read More…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…
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…s the demonic reality that somehow this is the defining moral issue of our time and is the litmus test for orthodoxy. Given that, I believe there will be a lot of out-of-hand dismissal of the book. Do you think the moveable middle of evangelicalism can use your book, especially its biblical exegesis, as a way to move toward acceptance for LGBT people? Evangelicalism is a very diverse, broad movement and there are many different expressions. I thin…
Read More…women to post photos of themselves—in whatever they choose to wear—with sentiments such as “Do I look oppressed to you?” or “Nudity DOES NOT liberate me and I DO NOT need saving.” A number of commenters in the group, in fact, seem to think that Femen members are the ones who are oppressed. I myself have experienced these events as something of a roller coaster ride. As someone temperamentally shy about my body, I was both horrified and impressed…
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…enter,” students filled out a computer card with their ID number, activity number, and the time, intensity, and distance of their workout. The data derived from the cards helped to determine grades. One student who had been forced to enroll in the Pounds Off Program said, “I’m really sad for the school. It has so much potential, so many positive things about it, but you can’t treat people this way… They treat you like you’re not close enough to Go…
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