Religion Dispatches
…e me appreciate how bold and unabashedly rigorous Randolph was in marrying free thought to social justice. As editor of the influential Messenger magazine he once sponsored a writing contest with the theme “Is Christianity a Menace to the Negro?”—a topic that is all but unthinkable today given the craven toadyism of much contemporary media. What’s your next book? A novel on a disreputable physicist’s drive to establish an all-black suburban develo…
Read More…ack when the future president was still a community organizer on Chicago’s south side. In fact, I don’t think Obama is a sellout or a Wall-Street lapdog, as some people have suggested. I believe that he is a generally moderate-to-liberal technocrat who honestly believes that he can do right by both big money and the little folks. And therein lies the problem. When your vision of economic leadership involves buzzwords like “competitiveness” and “in…
Read More…, I dare say Jim Crow laws would still be on the books here in my state of South Carolina. There are simply some matters, like the rights of minorities, that cannot be put to a popular vote — though the rights of gays and lesbians seem to be put to the vote often these days. Not all religious folks were complaining about the ruling, however. Rev. Rob Hardies, one of the co-chairs of DC Clergy United for Marriage Equality, said he was “delighted” w…
Read More…claims the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell would jeopardize the religious freedom of chaplains who believe homosexuality is sinful, so I wanted to ask a living, breathing chaplain what he thought about that claim. “Well,” he began, “we serve whoever comes to us. I don’t think it will be a big deal. There may be some who will have a problem with it, but we’re trained to treat it like any other sin.” He must have seen me roll my eyes involuntarily….
Read More…er groups. Men, blacks, and those living in the traditionally conservative South are less accepting of gays and lesbians; but even there, the numbers are encouraging. Fifty-five percent of men said they strongly or somewhat agree that there’s nothing wrong with same-sex marriage, while 47 percent of blacks said the same thing, and a majority of southern millennials, 56 percent, agreed. In fact, out of all of the subcategories, it’s only in the bla…
Read More…ector, Wayne Kopping, a South African neocon – from going on television to promote their work. The film has been promoted by numerous neoconservative, Jewish, and Christian Zionist outlets and activists, and no doubt Iranium will receive the same treatment, particularly if it is released around election time and could be used to question whether the Obama administration is doing enough to combat Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. In the meantime, though,…
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…an eventually became a slaveholder himself, one of the very small class of free black slaveholders in the nineteenth-century South. After his death, Bryan’s nephew, Andrew Marshall, took the pulpit at First African Baptist, and became one of the best known (and most controversial) black ministers of the antebellum era, leading to a major schism of the church body. In the early twentieth century, First African was rather famous for its fights and d…
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…mber 2007, for example, saw lengthy consultations on AIDS/HIV and Islam in South Africa sponsored by Islamic Relief International. The Sangha Metta Project brings Buddhist monks together to work on both prevention and care. And President-elect Barack Obama said in a 2006 speech to the Global Summit on AIDS and the Church, sponsored by evangelical Christian Rick Warren, that “Corinthians says that we are all of one spirit, and that ‘if one part suf…
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…, was photocopied and spiral-bound. Sold out of car trunks, given away for free, or bought over the internet (like I did in 2003), it was a sensation at the time. It is a sensation now, but for very different reasons. Soft Skull Press released a perfect-bound edition, with minor changes to the content, and it’s amazing what a difference presentation will make. In addition, they are releasing three more of MMK’s books: the sequel to Taqwacores, Osa…
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…en who will promote them over their progressive sisters can just as easily promote others over them. It is the power dynamic, not just the people, that is at issue here. Postmodern Catholicism is a different animal than its pre-Vatican II cousin. Catholics (women and men, lay and clerical, secular and religious) think for themselves, forming new syntheses of faith and solidarity. Nuns, perhaps more than many other Catholics, took the mandates of V…
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