Religion Dispatches
…rom friends and family) boosting her husband’s Art of Manliness-Man of the Year campaign on her Web site Ladies against Feminism and on various homeschooling blogs. Doing Demographic Battle with Nonbelievers When Doug Phillips blogged Chancey’s award campaign in the final 48 hours—he noted the large families of various other campaigners. Matt and Jennifer Chancey themselves have eight children. So far. According to Joyce, this fact is at the heart…
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…idn’t even know] if there was one in Orlando back then. So for me, as a 19-year-old kid, Exodus was the safe place. When I walked in, they didn’t beat me over the head with a Bible, they were a bunch of people who said, We get it. You’re welcome here and you can struggle along with the rest of us. The negative, or detriment, of Exodus is the same as the church, which is plugged into the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and is constantly poin…
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…disability, and why priests possessing pornographic images of a fourteen- year-old should be subject to less severe sanction than those possessing images of someone just one year younger. There are deeper concerns to be expressed here, questions involving theology and the history of the Church since the Second World War. But we need to read the Church’s own newspapers, and its own choice of language, in order to be able to bring them into focus a…
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…on. The Hmong people, an ethnic minority from Southeast Asia, have a 5,000-year-old religious tradition which is shamanistic and animistic. In Hmong cosmology, the spiritual world and the material world are linked in complex ways, and the shaman works on behalf of the community to restore health, harmony, and to keep good relations with the ancestors (for an excellent documentary on a Hmong shaman from Appleton named Paja Thao see The Split Horn.)…
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…designed to help—African Americans—has not been lost on historians. Three years earlier, in 1883, the Court had invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875; ten years later in Plessy v. Ferguson, it would formally validate the infamous “separate but equal” doctrine. What makes that Gilded Age dramatically different from our own, however, is that in 1886 there were powerful social movements pushing back against the plutocrats. The American Federation…
Read More…to return to my little house alone. I do love Indonesia. This was my first year since my children started to fast nearly three decades ago to be fasting alone in my house, while not living alone. I find it difficult. So when I came to the east coast, I got to enjoy fasting, suhur, prayer and iftar with the people I love the most on the planet: my own family. I remember posting on Twitter just how awesome it was to have that combination: my own eat…
Read More…in May 2014 and closely mirrored a law approved by Russia’s State Duma the year before. But in addition to the fine for the dissemination of “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” envisioned by the Russian law, the Kyrgyz bill also proposed jail terms of up to one year for those who “promote homosexual relations” through the media or among children. The head of the committee on rule of law, order and fighting crime, Janybek Bakchiev, sai…
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…Tan exhausted her asylum appeals and was facing possible deportation last year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced, and succeeded in passing, a private relief bill on her behalf; it would have to be renewed each year if Tan is to avoid deportation. In support of the bill, her priest, Fr. Piers M. Lahey of the Church of the Good Shepherd, wrote a letter to Feinstein which was entered into the Congressional Record. Lahey described Tan and Mercado as…
Read More…Ugandan television channels. The Anti-Homosexuality Bill was shelved last year, but reintroduced this February by its sponsor, Member of Parliament David Bahati (the same month the government shut down a conference of LGBT activists). Some news reports at the time said the death penalty had been removed from the bill. But Warren Throckmorton noted that the death penalty in fact remained. A BBC report quoted Bahati saying the original bill was rei…
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…t, even though VAWA specifically prohibits employment discrimination. Last year, a coalition of over 90 civil liberties, religious, health, women’s, and LGBT advocates again called on the Obama administration to reverse the World Vision Memo, calling it one of the most notable examples of the Bush Administration’s attempt to impose a constitutionally erroneous and deeply harmful policy—RFRA should not be interpreted or employed as a tool for broad…
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