Religion Dispatches
…The law of the land is marriage between and man and a woman and that needs to be upheld.” Freshman Republican Mike Pompeo of Kansas chimed in, “we cannot use military to promote social ideas that do not reflect the values of our nation.”…
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…outreach to the kids who attend Harvey Milk school, teaching LGBT youth to use art for self-expression. And they offer single-stall unisex bathrooms that allow transgendered people to use the facilities without trouble. Varghese offers a different perspective noting that in some feminist circles, a female who transitions into a male is perceived as caving in to the patriarchal narrative. In these settings, straight women often find themselves ost…
Read More…arbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality, urged Christians not to use the KJV because, Bauer said, “it was commissioned by a homosexual.” (Note that the anti-KJV campaign never really took off; it remains the most popular translation for evangelicals, according to a recent survey by the Southern Baptist Convention-affiliated LifeWay.) Perhaps, though, the Democratic Party would have some issues with one of its House members taking up the…
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…e you okay with your child marrying a scientist”—social scientists love to use that, because it’s a good measure of social distance—heck yeah, everyone would love their child to marry a scientist! These are highly educated people, who we hold in esteem. And “would you like your child to have more science education”—of course! But especially the more conservative faith traditions do sometimes feel like scientists overstep their bounds, and that the…
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…tends to be more ethnographic and qualitative. It’s a vicious circle, because women are socialized to ask certain kinds of questions, to be better listeners, and to be not as assertive or not as aggressive, so that also influences people’s choice of what to study and how to study it. Graduate school can also suck the genuine curiosity out of you—and this happens for men and women, though we respond to it differently. You are taught that you can’t…
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…ontinued for five more chapters concerning interactions and race relations between white and Black Jews during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. Thankfully, Oxford University Press’ readers reined me in, and I was left with the much more compact, and much more readable text as it stands today, which focuses on the period from the nineteenth century to the 1930s. Some scholars may wonder how large these groups were, especially since African Am…
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…ota spiritual leaders are careful regarding the details of their continued use of the Black Hills for religious purposes, there is no doubt they visit and still use their sacred sites on lands stolen over 135 years ago; lands they’re now forced to try to buy back. The brochure for the sale of the lands by Brock’s Auction House of South Dakota obliquely mentions the moment: “For 136 years, brave, strong, pioneering families… have forged the prairie…
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…these documents. A former Air Force intelligence officer told me that the use of biblical verses on cover sheets, in his experience, is “not at all surprising.” Many of those privy to such briefings probably would have been Christian, he suspects, and the rest “knew better than to object.” Scriptural errancy Those who want to recover their traditions from conflation with errant militarism can begin by correcting some simple misunderstandings that…
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…thers. In his mind, nations can only be founded on a shared ethnicity, because “your kin have belonged to this people, on this land—to this nation in this place—and so they bind you to that people and place, creating a common volkgeist.” Wolfe’s argument for nationalism based on the shared ethnicity of a volk based in blood relations comes into focus when he explains his intended reader. “I am male, and am rooted ancestrally in Western Europe, and…
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…have asked what the term “evangelical” itself might be a metaphor for. Because regardless of the actual content of any specific definition of evangelicalism, the term is ultimately a social construction not unlike race, gender, and religion itself. And like all social constructions, evangelicalism’s meaning and use impacts how we understand and see the world. So, if we want to stop being surprised by the things that evangelicals do, it’s time to s…
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