Religion Dispatches
…ot about reality television’s most charismatic Christian, ex-Run-DMC rap star, Reverend Run. In MTV’s Run’s House, the Rev lives with his big, blended family in New Jersey. It’s part hip-hop, part Brady Bunch. And he sermonizes from the bathtub. Bet he would have given a heck of an inaugural invocation too……
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…n a TV show called “Hablando con padre Alberto,” was the victim of Mexican paparazzi for the celebrity magazine TVnotas. TVnotas published 25 photos of Cutie and a woman relaxing on the beach and kissing at a local bar. One photo shows Cutie with his hands in the woman’s bathing suit bottom. At least, some say, he wasn’t caught abusing a young boy. Cutie has spoken out. On CBS’s Early Show [watch video below] he said, “I believe I have fallen in l…
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…itled “War and Peace: A Buddhist Perspective”. In it, he confirms that the Pali Buddhist tradition does bend strongly toward both pacifism and moral absolutism. At the same time, he wonders if military might could be right in some real-world scenarios. “It thus seems to me that the ethics of early Buddhism simply do not cover all the predicaments of the human situation,” he writes. “[In] circumstances where moral obligations run at crosscurrents……
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…red with anti-critical race theory laws being passed for K-12 schools in a number of Republican states and further bills aimed at higher education proposed. What many will perhaps find more surprising is that the rhetoric being used by Campus Reform and their ilk is far from new to me or fellow researchers working on racial justice in American Buddhism. Rather it echoes some of the white Buddhist backlash to racial justice work. A number of white…
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…l Been Ready.” The movie scared countless teenagers (and probably an equal number of adults) into preparing for the rapture. Millennial fervor swept evangelicals again in the late 1990s on the heels of the two-term Clinton presidency. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins published Left Behind, the first in a series of novels that grew into the best-selling series of the past decade (until they were finally overtaken by the true prince of darkness himself,…
Read More…” or “honest,” increased from 18% in 2011 to 24% in 2012. All of these gains were concentrated among Republicans voting for Romney, naturally. Still, the number one word survey participants associated with Mormons? “Cult.” And fully 27% of survey respondents still have no idea what religion Mitt Romney is….
Read More…sn’t bode well for the GOP’s future. If young voters primarily thought the Republican Party’s policy plan in 2012 was to prevent gay marriage and to ensure very low taxes for very rich people. . . it’s understandable that a large majority voted the other way. . . . Opposition to gay marriage is a ‘deal breaker’ to one out of four young voters. And it’s not just the marriage issue. Younger Republicans don’t like how the GOP treats the poor and immi…
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…oses the Stupak amendment), said his understanding was that a condition of participating in that teleconference was agreeing that Capps was a compromise that everyone could live with. The overall tenor of the Faith for Health Web site and the 40 Days for Health campaign that FPL coordinated was passage of health care—without discussing abortion funding. The Rev. Jennifer Butler, FPL’s executive director, said there was no “litmus test” for partici…
Read More…nge is a real problem: For a guy who’s been touting his potential to draw Spanish-speaking voters into the Republican fold, this is a sticky situation. Hispanic Catholics, as it turns out, actually care about the environment, and so does the first pope from Latin America. Bush is working at cross-purposes, claiming to speak for Hispanic values while ignoring at least one of their issues. He wouldn’t be the first politician to try to pull a fast on…
Read More…d Perez-Trugila indicate that sex abuse scandals cost the church money and participation, but not necessarily faith. For many Millennials and members of Generation X, who make up the largest percentage of the religiously unaffiliated, the sex abuse scandal may or may not be as much of an issue as it was to their parents and grandparents. Christian Smith, who is co-Principal Investigator of the multi-year National Study of Youth and Religion at Not…
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