Religion Dispatches
…ur brother’s couch to having your every move tweeted and to be followed by paparazzi. Your privacy is instantly gone, any warts you have are instantly magnified, and you are suddenly catapulted into the limelight. Worse, you are now made into a figurehead, for religious people, and in Lin’s case, for Asian-Americans too. If Lin stumbles—if he gets into a fight in a bar, or behaves inappropriately with women, or commits any number of minor sins whi…
Read More…you made it into the book. I told him I do not need the recognition of the particular parties involved, including the neo-Orientalist scholar who edited it, to affirm my contributions to Islam (or to my faith, for both are part of my devotion to Allah). They do have a substantial number of women included, so I would not complain on that count. But, here’s the thing: there are no women under the category of Muslim intellectuals. Apparently women do…
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…r the meaning of words. But it did not awaken any religious feeling, which part of me hoped it would. The rituals still did not resonate, and the only emotional response prayer elicited was jealousy of those who find such activities so meaningful. As I was coming to realize this was not my path to Jewish faith, I was reminded that my appearance would always make my Jewishness more accepted than the members of Beth Emet who had worked so hard to bu…
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…de against Albanian Kosovars in the late 1990s. The fact is, a significant number of Serbs, and even a large number of others from traditionally Orthodox backgrounds, continue to harbor a great deal of anger about Western intervention in the Kosovo War, which they see as a failure by the West to comprehend the historical role-reversal that’s taken place, including the persecution of Orthodox Christians by Albanians and other majority-Muslim ethnic…
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…Movement Organizers feel that the sky is the limit with respect to the campaign’s ultimate impact. They note that even before the campaign goes public, Believe Out Loud has attracted over a thousand Facebook fans. They are convinced it will have special appeal to younger people, and they are making sure that BOL subscribers will have access to all of the goodies that today’s young social networkers crave, such as opportunities to gift each other…
Read More…o friends and family, including Mormons in mixed-orientation marriages and parents of gay LDS children. Their telling of personal stories has an impact on close-knit LDS communities and kinship networks: when Mormons recognize how many families in their wards and stakes are grappling with LGBT issues, it makes it much more difficult for these issues to be framed in oppositional “us” versus “them,” “Mormons” versus “the world” terms, as it was duri…
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…ngregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It drew a number of high-profile participants and attendees from anti-gay religious activists in the U.S. A centerpiece of the “Humanum” conference was a set of six videos, which it turns out were produced by Mark Regnerus, author of a discredited report on “family structures” that is still widely cited by anti-gay activists. Conservative activists, including Tony Perkins, Brian Brown, and Eric Teetsel, he…
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…st likely to indicate outright refusal to take a Covid-19 vaccine, while a number of other studies have also found that number hovering close to 25 percent. Journalists and academics alike have attempted to make sense of this discrepancy, pointing to existential fear, anti-intellectualism, and Christian nationalism as potential influences on American evangelicals’ vaccine antipathy. As a scholar of American evangelicalism and media, I am inclined…
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…es and information. The stigma around sex and contraception has hidden the pain caused to their private parts and lives from public view. We therefore have to read between the lines of the many newspaper articles about injuries caused by Lysol and similar products. In 1934, for example, a short news item in the Hammond Indiana Times reported how two unmarried eighteen-year-old “Chicago girls are in St. Margaret’s hospital today, severely burned ab…
Read More…up to protest against Pride have been vastly outnumbered by the Christians participating in it. Hill also noted religious support in the UK last April for a new law “to allow religious elements in civil partnerships, while last year the Quakers became the first major Christian denomination to resolve to carry out same-sex marriages.” Even here in the United States, the trend toward full acceptance of gays and lesbians seems to be growing. A Gallup…
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