Religion Dispatches
…woman! Jesus never had a chance to grow up as a sycophant. And now in our day, another impolite and bloodied prophet, John Lewis, has rattled the timbers of political propriety. He denounced the new president as lacking legitimacy. Even liberals who rushed to his defense missed his point, confusing legal and moral legitimacy. Legal legitimacy is always subordinate to the judgement of moral legitimacy. Slavery, after all, was legally legitimate: A…
Read More…e spiritual lives of Mormon men and women. It’s a conversation restarted today. Even as the day’s events left many rank and file Mormons scratching their heads and admitting that they have no idea what Mormon feminism is really about. This is a great time to learn. To learn more about what Wear Pants to Church Day was really about, please read this and this and this and this. And to learn about what Mormon feminists care about and what they mean…
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…justice causes from women’s rights and the abolition of slavery to present-day struggles for marriage equality and ecological stewardship. Additionally, progressive people need a renewed commitment to building and sustaining communities of faith—houses of hope—that can nourish our values and empower us for the long-haul change needed to establish a just and sustainable society. Is there anything you had to leave out? We love the 19th-century progr…
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…Trump’s supporters are no more likely than Biden’s to think America’s best days are behind us. They are only slightly less likely to feel America’s best days are still to come. The biggest difference in terms of proportions are that over twice as many Americans who plan on voting Trump think America is experiencing its best days right now. Source: Public Discourse and Ethics Survey (August 2020) It turns out that Trump’s voting base, often describ…
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…s been rising about one percentage point a year for the past five years. Today, one out of five adults, and more than one in three 18- to 22-year-olds, are religiously unaffiliated. But “unaffiliated” doesn’t mean unbelieving. Many of these same adults are spiritual. Most believe in God. One-fifth say they pray every day. And a version of religious fervor can be found among both secular and religious fans of just about everything. Religion scholar…
Read More…bera believes it’s immoral for kids to see their gay dads go to work every day, take out the trash, and instruct their children to clean their rooms and make their beds. What horrible fathers! There is not a shred of proof that gay men are worse fathers than straight men. In fact, a recent study, quoted in the Advocate, showed that “gay fathers were more likely to scale back their careers in order to care for their children. Another difference was…
Read More…no noisy AC it is actually more open and breezy. Anyway we only spend the day there. Once all the busloads were there and midday came along, we managed to open the tents between the women’s section and the men’s section to listen to a sermon (in English). Then we combined and shortened the Zuhr and Asr prayers. This is so striking to me—the normal five times daily prayer is reconfigured in such a way that meditation and asking for forgiveness is…
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…aren, a hospital chaplain, as part of an ongoing research project. On that day, I arrived at the hospital promptly at nine only to learn that her day had started almost three hours earlier, with visits to patients waiting for same-day surgeries. By nine, we were on our way to a meeting of the palliative care team—which was followed by patient visits, conversations with families, and support for social workers who were taking the family members of…
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…nest public dialogue with one another. Questions of difference loomed that day, and much of the discussion centered around the idea that not only do we have, surprisingly, a lot in common—an important point worth remembering and repeating in a culture that frequently lifts up conflict while ignoring harmony—but that we also carry profoundly important and seemingly irreconcilable differences. In that sense, the conference left me (and I suspect man…
Read More…exism in our formal doctrines and church practices. I therefore viewed the day after the scheduled black mass as a day of mourning—mourning that, instead of seeking out the Other, we acted on the bases of prejudices and fears; mourning that, instead of looking for points of dialogue, we performed only denunciations; and mourning that my religious community participated in a pattern of exclusion and ostracization for which we, in many real ways, ar…
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