Religion Dispatches
…om the embassy’s public relations strategy, which includes wondering if pro-Palestinian Israeli activists are motivated less by ideology and more by “sexual identity problems.” Seriously. Setting that kind of tone will probably only encourage more and more absurd statements. The recent post on Jesus seems especially insensitive, considering who it is being directed to and where it is apparently originating. A number of Palestinians are Christians,…
Read More
…ecently being “Jewish” was a liability and anti-semitism was palpable, the number of non-Jews today who identify as Jewish seems historically distinctive. We could, perhaps, point to the so-called “fearers of heaven,” an undocumented community of Hellenes in late antiquity who lived in large Jewish population centers, apparently lived partially as Jews, and had some status in the Jewish community. But today’s non-Jewish Jews aren’t identifying as…
Read More
…king purchasing power, disappearing job opportunities, and increasingly out-of-reach education. This is problem enough for the many who work hard and can’t figure out why they’re “losing ground,” as Pew wrote. Add to that fears of terrorism. People want relief. But if no solution presents itself, either lassitude or rage set in, along with the search for saviors who’ll deliver relief from material hardship—but who also make people feel the world i…
Read More
…) effort has rung alarm bells among observers, stoking fears that the right-of-center government of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi (a self-described Hindu nationalist), are seeking to undermine post-independence India’s secular ideals. It has drawn so much attention, in fact, that it prompted President Obama to issue a not-so-subtle rebuke to Modi’s government for not doing more to protect religious minorities. Among I…
Read More
…favorable to Trump—which they were, with 60 percent backing him despite all-but-explicit condemnations by Pope Francis: Through imagery and rhetoric, the bishops unambiguously associated the requirement to opt out of the [Affordable Care Act’s] contraception mandate with threats to destroy Christianity in the Middle East. They drew parallels to “governments who try to squash and destroy religious liberty,” and even to the specter of ISIS beheading…
Read More
…men eat shrimp?” is a popular search query in the US) or the ratio of heart-related to penis-related searches (67:100 for those keeping score). This Sunday, Stephens-Davidowitz turned his attention to God. Some of the patterns he documents are predictable, such as the steep reduction in “Google searches for churches,” yet more evidence of the increasing number of “nones,” or that “searches related to the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, church and prayer…
Read More…d all sex outside marriage to be illegal. More from Associated Press: The 5-to-4 decision by the nine-judge panel of the Constitutional Court rejected the arguments of a conservative group, the Family Love Alliance, which believes Indonesia is being swamped by immoral behavior, fueled by the internet and social media. Members of the group wept as it became clear the court would not side with them. Rights advocates had feared judges would criminali…
Read More
…a member of the Christian right. Rogers, who has worked for the pro-church-state-separation group the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, and now has an affiliation with the Brookings Institution, is one of the country’s best authorities on church-state separation law, and an advocate for enforcement of the Establishment Clause. Not only would Rogers herself be surprised to be on the list, I’d imagine, but so would the Christian right i…
Read More…ss, and fifteen were reported to be suffering ill effects. In spite of the number of people who experienced difficulties during each of the eight fifteen-minute rounds, Ray contends he did not know that there were problems. In fact, Ray is accused of ignoring the pleas of those who wanted out; in one case an individual went out through the side of the sweat lodge to escape the heat. The prosecution played tapes of Ray before the sweat saying, “It’…
Read More
…im organizations fall into lock-step with it, stems solely from a single 20-year-old document written by a single Brotherhood member in 1991. In the controversial terrorism financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation, which first resulted in a mistrial in 2007, and convictions in a 2008 re-trial, federal prosecutors introduced a document, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.” Gaffney and others h…
Read More