Religion Dispatches
…, our parents, our teachers, and our country.” Alveda King, a speaker at Renewing Honor, also sounded this theme, saying a return of school prayer would be one indication that the nation had indeed restored its honor. The prayer Lee cited had been composed by New York state officials to be read in public school classrooms at the start of the school day. Lee said the prayer “is not an establishment of any particular religion, but an acknowledgment…
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…hts—whether it is to be considered fully a “person” under the law—is not a new question. In the 18th century, the Lord Chancellor of England famously scoffed at the claim, asking, “Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned and no body to be kicked?” In the Affordable Care Act cases, some courts have avoided the difficult issue of whether a business has religious conscience rights by instead concluding…
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…doubt that a start would have been not being able to count on one hand the number of Black children in my entire Christian school student-body. Do Black educators only exist in public schools? Of course not. Why then couldn’t we find more Black scholars to employ when it came to teaching children? I can tell you that I’ll recognize change as genuine when white preachers and ministers stop using Bible verses to pacify their white congregants by amp…
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…ls her ‘mission statement, if I have one,’” writes Rachel Syme in a recent New Yorker profile. On the track, Baker declares, “But I think there’s a god and he hears either way when I rejoice and complain/Lift my voice that I was made/And somebody’s listening at night with the ghosts of my friends when I pray.” This God is not an amorphous therapeutic deity of yesteryear nor a mostly ornamental cross in a photo shoot. This is the living Lord who he…
Read More…one to measure the pontiff’s influence” than, say, actual metrics like the number of people going to mass or returning to the church. According to Burke, you just have to “ask around” Boston to find folks who know someone who’s thinking about returning to the church or who feels less horrible about the church than in the darkest days of the U.S. clerical sex abuse scandal, which had Boston at its epicenter. That’s a pretty low bar, but of course n…
Read More…have dismissed the film as blatantly false. But what I’m hearing from a number of Mormons deeply familiar with the Proposition 8 campaign is that the film gets it mostly right. [See also Holly Welker’s review here. – Eds] Some take exception to editing choices that sequence events out of context for dramatic effect; others wish that the filmmakers had not been so cartoonish in their depictions of anti-gay-marriage standpoints, using only notori…
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…ith every outward step, as our universe and our ignorance grows, so do the number of potential space alien hideouts. So does the belief that there must be someone out there. So every time I read about the discovery of a new Earth-like planet or read about NASA’s upcoming Kepler planet-finding mission or watch a movie like Contact, I grow excited over—and, like Brahe, even a little afraid of—the vast unknown. My mind boggles. What’s really out ther…
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