Religion Dispatches
…s Facebook profile shows him wearing patches of the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia and sitting on a car with a license plate bearing the words “Confederate States of America.” He reportedly said, after sitting for an hour next to Pinckney and other worshippers at Emanuel, and after shooting them, and after a worshipper attempted to talk him out of reloading his gun, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our…
Read More…o Brazil, where cultural religious traditions such as Candomble are demonized, and Pentecostalism is lauded as the progressive religion not connected to a difficult history? I predict all of the above. The fears of the Sudan Ecumenical Forum that South Sudan is “ripe for exploitation by unscrupulous preachers” are well founded. The die has been cast, and the relationship that was started in order to stop genocide will be a relationship that will f…
Read More…few months ago: winning in the South. Romney is now up by double-digits in South Carolina, the first primary south of the Mason-Dixon line. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard LDS people say that a Mormon candidate like Romney could “never win in the South” owing to historically deep-seated anti-Mormon prejudice. (For a refresher course on the roots of that prejudice, please see this interview with religion historian Patrick Mason here at R…
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…or laws.” Even though some political activists in Middle Eastern and North African countries promote “Islamic law” in reaction to the imposition of European-style government and legal systems on them, there is no single school of thought on what shari’ah, or divine law, is or means—and there is no single, accepted legal code. “If Islamic law were some book where you could look to it and cite to it, and say, it says right here that Western democrac…
Read More…nisia, punishable by up to three years in prison. Article 230 of the penal code criminalizes “homosexual acts” by both men and women in the Arabic text and “sodomy” in the French version. Despite the recent move to legalize an LGBT organization in Tunisia, the continued criminalization of homosexuality in Article 230 still severely threatens sexual minorities in the North African country. In the 9 days since Shams’ received its authorization, loca…
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… In “A Million Little Fibers,” a similarly fictionalized story by Towelie, South Park’s resident sentient, pot-smoking towel (it’s a long story), is defended for the inspiration it has provided others: “What’s the big deal? His book helped people; why does it matter that he made some stuff up?” This appreciation for the value of a well-told story extends to a love of the story-teller. The Joseph Smith in The Book of Mormon is (like the South Park…
Read More…. But who is to decide what constitutes a “vice against nature”? The Portuguese legislators had been too coy to mention gay sex explicitly, and so a meaningless clause entered the statute books, which no court could act upon. This year, the Penal Code was rewritten. The new Penal Code sweeps away a great deal of the musty colonial legacy, including the mention of “vices against nature”. Now not even the most contorted of arguments could claim that…
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…active in Asia, Australia, Canada, Central America, the Caribbean, Europe, South Africa, South America, Ukraine and the US. CIGN envisions the church as “God’s instrument to establish and extend God’s Kingdom until the literal coming of Christ to reign over all the earth.” Towards this end, CIGN believes that “God has entrusted the church the solemn Biblical responsibility of being the conscience of society, culture and government” and therefore i…
Read More…violence against LGBT people. Anderson was recently banned from the UK and South Africa and deported from Botswana because of his virulently anti-LGBT rhetoric. But many other anti-LGBT groups cloak their rhetoric in terminology like “support for the natural family,” which sounds benign on the surface but actually excludes any family structure that does not follow the so-called “one man/one woman” model. Kenya has been a particular focal point of…
Read More…s Thahir Mohammed Sayyed, India’s entrant for the Mr. Gay World pageant in South Africa, pulled out of the competition and went into hiding, reports TIME’s Rishi Iyengar, after threats to himself and his family in India. As we have reported, homosexuality was recriminalized in 2013 when the country’s high court overturned an earlier ruling that abolished the colonial-era sodomy law. TIME also notes that India recently voted for Russia’s unsuccessf…
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