Religion Dispatches
…ly wage. One gay Mormon friend told me, “I read The Book of Mormon, and it does not say that gay sex brings the downfall of a civilization. The consumption of fine linens and costly apparel—pride—does.” But most of the Mormons shopping City Creek this Saturday General Conference afternoon put such thoughts out of their minds. There is, instead, a sense of assurance—in seeing so many other LDS people of all ethnicities and nationalities in one plac…
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…ate, an ancient institution revived by Vatican II. In 2000, 341 of Mexico’s 800 deacons served the Diocese of San Cristobal, the largest number of deacons in any Catholic diocese in the world. Vatican suspicion of Bishop Ruiz’s liberationist pastoral strategy resulted in a failed attempt to remove him in 1993. The deacon program came under particular scrutiny after the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, with reports that Maya catechists defied th…
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…arge part of the Great Plains, restored wildlife and built a system of over 800 state and county parks. They electrified an entire region of the country, bringing what had been America’s “Third World” up to 20th century standards. They created works of art, gave concerts, set up theaters throughout the country, ran nursery schools, served over 1.2 billion school lunches to needy children, gave immunizations, taught illiterate adults to read and wr…
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…most Catholic health care institutions have accepted the accommodation, a number of the nation’s 260 Catholic institutions of higher learning as well as Catholic nonprofits are seeking a broader exemption that would in effect bar their insurers from providing contraceptive coverage as specified under the accommodation designed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a consolidated case challenging th…
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…best endowed financially, provide parsonages. But over time, an increasing number of clergy have made their own living arrangements. Churches found parsonages prohibitively expensive; congregants preferred to see their donations go toward services rather than clergy housing; and new religious ventures, especially the nondenominational and evangelical churches that began to flourish in the second half of the twentieth century, could not boast the h…
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…h the question of whether journalism reflects public opinion, shapes it or does a little of both. Insofar as religion influences attitudes about sexuality—which it does directly to the faithful and indirectly through cultural osmosis to many others—coverage of religious responses to AIDS offers provocative possibilities as well as ways to chart cultural change. In 1981, for example, few Americans would have taken seriously the possibility of gay m…
Read MoreWhile a number of conservative Christian leaders raise questions about Glenn Beck’s Mormonism, Worldview Matters’ host Brannon Howse continued his attack in a conversation with Kirk Cameron about why Cameron did not participate in Glenn Beck’s Divine Destiny. Howse marveled at the “thick irony” wherein Cameron (the actor who played Buck, the converted journalist warning about the “demonic spirituality of a one world religion” in the Left Behind m…
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…an religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with sur…
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…ce as benign-sounding “sexual reorientation therapy.” Although the article does include boilerplate statements from several leading medical and mental health organizations that have condemned so-called conversion therapy, it does not offer any additional resources to understand the real-world impact. Despite the existence of numerous peer-reviewed studies that have documented the harm such treatment inflicts on its subjects, the article does not b…
Read More…h, this work is not about an emic, ethnographic approach, although Doniger does make use of such data for the modern period that includes the presence of anthropology. However, the second and more troublesome error is Shukla’s view of scholarship on religion. The interpretative dimension is not what is wrong with the study of religion—or of any discipline for that matter. Rather, interpretation is the activity that enables disciplines to develop a…
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