Religion Dispatches
…e to be held back. Their passion is a witness to people of faith and we as United Methodists will continue to educate and mobilize ourselves and others until Congress finally does what is right. Today we stand with the DREAM Act students and tomorrow we will continue the struggle until Congress recognizes the contributions and leadership of our immigrant sisters and brothers. A veritable communist manifesto, right? But here’s Phillips: “In short,”…
Read More…s. India: Materials targeting adolescents challenge gender stereotypes and promote respect The Health Secretary published materials designed to be used by adolescent peer educators on health issues. The materials aim to dispel gender stereotypes and promote relationships based on respect, reports Abantika Ghosh in The Indian Express: The legality of homosexuality may still be an open question for the judiciary and the Government is yet to change t…
Read More…ciation bankrolled the event, sent an email to registrants introducing the United in Purpose voter registration project Champion the Vote. Wildmon wrote, “research has shown that it takes only 5 million voters to influence the outcome of an election. This is a do-able goal, and Champion the Vote is seeking Champions – an army of volunteers — to help with the effort. A Champion is simply a Christian talking to other Christians about registering and…
Read More…tty safe to assume that a significant number of “Concerned Citizens of the United States” are Mormon. But so too are a significant number of undocumented immigrants living in the American West. As we’ve reported here at RD, the Church’s strongest growth over the last decade has been among Latino populations, and almost 4.5 million Mormons worldwide are Spanish-speaking. Economic downtimes and anti-immigrant outcry go hand-in-hand in American histo…
Read More…percent thought so back in 1982. The trend among Christian churches in the United States has also been toward acceptance. The United Church of Christ, on July 4, 2005, became the only mainline denomination to affirm its support for marriage equality. Other denominations, like the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), have moved to remove bans on the ordination of gay and lesbian ministers. The Presbyterian Church (USA), remains on the ver…
Read More…s, as some anti-UN activists maintain, that the UN is an organization that promotes eugenics. Concerned Women for America has claimed that the UNFPA has been “intimately involved” in the promoting abortion in China under that country’s one-child policy, which it claims has killed a number of people “comparable to the horrendous genocides by Hitler and Pol Pot.” (The eugenics falsehood is also disseminated about Planned Parenthood, and in this coun…
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…nal facilities, was shut down by the state of Iowa in 2008 after Americans United for the Separation of Church and State won a legal challenge to its constitutionality. AU charged, and the court agreed, that InnerChange, which received government funding, required inmate participants “to attend Bible study, Christian classes, and church services,” in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Alex Luchenitser, the lead litigator…
Read More…ng of the country.” Lynn: I’dd like to save Dubois and Vest some time. The United States was not founded on the Bible. It was not founded on the Koran. It was not founded on the Bhagavad Gita. It was not founded on any holy book. If you read the Constitution and then the Bible you will see major differences. In the Bible there is no Bill of Rights, no representative democracy, no equal branches of government with “checks and balances” and no “We t…
Read More…insists also that a fundamental human right is the protection of religious freedom–namely, freedom of conscience, belief, and religion, including, alone and in community, in private and in public, the right to freedom of worship and practice, the right to manifest one’s religion, as well as the right of religious communities to religious education and to the full function and exercise of their religious duties, without any form of direct or indire…
Read More…bly last week, a leading African cardinal blasted the “idolatry of Western freedom” as equivalent to “Islamic fundamentalism” and compared both to “apocalyptic beasts.” Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea, a top official in the Roman Curia, also said that divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage in the West, and Islamic fundamentalism in Africa and elsewhere, both had a “demonic origin” that the synod had to combat. “What Nazi-fascism and communism wer…
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