Religion Dispatches
…ch the Soviet government made a strategic attempt to extract religion from Central Asian satellites and replace it with Soviet nationalism. Outwardly, religiosity appears to be rising in Uzbekistan: mosque attendance is up and more women are wearing headscarves. But there is a crucial detail on the headscarf bit: the problem isn’t that women are wearing headscarves. Tursunov’s objection is that women are wearing a specific type of headscarves. The…
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…in numbers and influence so did his financial worth. In 1972 the Satya Sai Central Trust was set up. Today the trust is estimated to be worth at least $8.9 billion. It has funded water supply projects in poor areas of southern India as well as ashrams, hospitals, universities, and several schools across India and globally. Sai Baba was most famous for his miracles—mainly materializations of valuable objects. He is believed to have had the power to…
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…sts began systematically to address the two interlinked questions that are central to any legal system: how to decide between two different arguments concerning a rule; and how to resolve cases that are not explicitly covered by clear rules in the first place. In the years since then, countless thousands of scholars have spent their lives struggling to interpret God’s law (a task known as ijtihad), with prolific results. Islamic jurisprudence go…
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…cussing the church’s involvement with polygamy. I believe that polygamy is central to an understanding of the church’s attitude toward gay marriage. Several years ago, at a gathering comprised primarily of faithful Mormons, I heard an LDS lawyer state quietly that one reason the church was so anxious to institute bans on gay marriage was that the leaders knew that if gay marriage ever became widely legal and accepted, polygamy would subsequently b…
Read More…ion. Her task to start the second day of trial is to knock down one of the central arguments of gay marriage foes: that the state has a compelling interest in restricting marriage to heterosexual couples because of the procreative purpose of marriage. Asked by plaintiff’s attorney Theodore Boutrous whether procreation is a central purpose of marriage, Cott scoffed, nothing that President George Washington, “the father of our country,” was sterile…
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…known group whose name implied that it was from the Deccan region of south-central India, which has a significant Muslim population. With what to Indian eyes seemed a maddeningly misplaced skepticism, the Western media remained neutral about the origin of the men, despite offering no alternative explanation. During the event, it was a British newspaper, the Observer, that traced the surviving man to a rural part of Pakistan. In Pakistan, official…
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…ircles, beginning with the Church’s endorsement of “globalist agendas” and promotion of the “secret combinations” that control the Covid-19 narrative. Under an image of Russell M. Nelson, the group wrote: “Our research demonstrates that this tyrant is using a false pandemic to force the world to accept a vaccination. This ‘cure’ will make most people who receive it susceptible to a ‘wild virus.’ This may surface later on, after most of the entire…
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…obert Jeffress, who just a year ago endorsed Rick Perry over Romney in the Republican Primary, and called Mormonism a cult, is now telling pastors in Florida—even though he still thinks Mormonism is a cult—that “It’s time to stand up and push back against all the evil in our country.” He suggested that failing to go out to vote for Romney would be like being a pastor in Germany in the 1930s and failing to try to stop the Holocaust. Meanwhile, Char…
Read More…nce, often employs biblical imagery, especially the suffering of Christ, a central theme in his art. The rest of his exhibit, titled “Religion, Flesh and Power,” remains on display until May 10 with two other controversial images: A sculpture of Jesus on the cross without a loincloth, and a crucifixion in which a soldier holds Jesus’ genitals while beating him. Over the past 20 years, artists in many nations, working in isolation, began portraying…
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…hen there are Roy and Silo, two male Chinstrap penguins in New York City’s Central Park Zoo that successfully hatched an egg they’d been given. And so on. In the case of humans, it’s been around for thousands of years (if not longer). Homosexuality is a part of nature—a part of the world that God created (if you believe that God created it)—and by any definition of the word, it’s natural. Okay, I think, Elder Packer is old. He’s a product of a dif…
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