Religion Dispatches
…of that God-given message. As one former Hagee follower told me, when the San Antonio Express-News published an exposé of Hagee’s excessive compensation in 2003, she read the article but “would not look at his tax returns. Out of respect to him. And I wrote the reporter a scathing letter, telling her—I invited her to church—to tell her how wrong she was.” Because churches are not required by the Internal Revenue Service to file tax returns, and n…
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…ppointed” by it. RTE reports, “Late last year, the bishops distributed thousands of copies of a pastoral statement promoting the church’s teaching on marriage and opposing the State’s attempt to redefine it in the referendum.” Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s Minister for Health, came out on Sunday, connecting his action with the country’s upcoming referendum on marriage equality. From the Irish Times: “There’s a referendum on marriage equality coming up t…
Read More…ublic health researchers working in cooperation with Mormon lay leaders at San Francisco State University’s Family Acceptance project. But with its explicit call for improved treatment of LGBT people within Mormon communities, the mormonsandgays.com site opens new horizons of possibility. Kendall Wilcox, a gay Mormon and maker of the documentary Far Between, “I am encouraged by the fact that the Church is promoting the value of listening to and em…
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…ool handbook with anti-gay rhetoric have punctuated his unpopular stint in San Francisco. The smart money is on him being promoted and relocated, as happened with Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law and other clerics who have contributed so actively to the rapid exodus of members from Catholic parishes. At some point, these sorts of executive employees become too expensive to maintain. It becomes cost effective to put a golden parachute on their mitres…
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…goes on to cast doubt on the reliability of both electricity and roads in San Juan, bitterly ironic in the current catastrophic moment but nasty enough in the original to read like Kipling, but with a quicker rhyme-scheme. As a project, “Almost Like Praying” is a motley collection of styles and voices, in true “puerto” fashion, the hybridity and default cosmopolitanism of port culture. But it’s also an exemplification of a model of community valu…
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…n atheist, I question the Abrahamic traditions. Just because those are thousands of years old, just because they’ve been validated by scholars and religious leaders, that does not give them infallibility. Why has it been so easy for society to erase the memory of race with regard to the People’s Temple, to think of it as more or less a white movement? The truth of Jonestown has been lost because it’s been demonized to a certain extent. The impress…
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…pope. In fact, the updated Vatican guidance comes just three months after San Antonio priest Father John Mary Foster claimed he received three prophetic messages directly from God stating that Francis is a “usurper,” and that left-leaning Church leadership is a sign, as Galassini argues, of the End Times. In God’s second message, titled Time to Join My Army—A Call to Priests and Bishops, God told Foster that: You have not only let the smoke of Sa…
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…a terrible death by Covid. The shooting massacres The shooting massacre in San Jose, which killed nine people, including the killer, is the latest in a seemingly endless string of massacres that America has witnessed since the expiration of the assault weapons ban in 2004, but especially since 2012 when a young man shot to pieces 20 kids in an elementary school in suburban Connecticut. The Republicans are the problem. They have blocked, time and a…
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…35-year-old woman, Ashli Babbitt, had flown to Washington from her home in San Diego at the behest of Donald Trump who urged his supporters to interfere with the electoral vote tally. She had served for twelve years, including being a security guard for US Air Force bases, and had risen to the rank of Senior Airman. Her husband, who remained in San Diego, described her as an enthusiastic supporter of the President, but not emotionally unstable. Li…
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…y “came out” as no longer evangelical. But it wasn’t until that moment, in San Francisco with my always “deep,” cooler-than-thou, “rebellious” cousin, that I was wholly disabused of the notion that young evangelicals were differentiating from their parents on social and political issues in any substantive way. Unfortunately, America’s major media outlets still haven’t gotten the memo. To be sure, anyone can cite anecdotes and claim to intuit a tre…
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