Religion Dispatches
…s toys, without acknowledging the spiritual authority of believers as they use them in the world and bring their experience and insight into religious institutions misunderstands the radically participatory, dialogical, and collaborative nature of a contemporary Western culture informed by digital social technologies. It inadvertently reinforces a line between “faith” and “life” that believers now routinely transgress. Bible Mash-Up Where religiou…
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…would probably not seek to change other ex-gay ministries that continue to use “reparative therapy” or other harmful “treatments” on LGBT people. “We’re not interested in fighting anymore,” Rodgers said. We want to work on suicide prevention and anti-bullying causes. We’re more concerned with seeing human flourishing.” It’s all very promising and conciliatory talk from an outfit that has done much harm to the LGBT community in the past. But if the…
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…ologies that have arisen out of neo-Marxist, postmodern worldviews and are used by many to promote those worldviews today.” The continued critique of CRT and Intersectionality led to the formation of the Conservative Baptist Network. According to their purpose statement, they believe in a “just society for all based on biblical truth, opposing racism and sexism in all forms, and therefore rejects worldly ideologies infiltrating the Southern Baptis…
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…ination to take over their denomination around the issue of gay rights because it’s a real strategy that’s being used. Certainly the religious right has an agenda but I put more blame on the Republican party, which really didn’t have a personal agenda. But they made this calculation to cynically use the religious right in order to maintain power. As [gay Congressman] Barney Frank (D-MA) says in the film, in the seventies, Democrats and Republicans…
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…over the years, I continued to work out strategies for filling those gaps between written texts and lived experience. Once I discovered the synergy between my experiences as a child and the women in the study and how important talking to the dead was to us all, I realized that I had a niche for framing the disconnect that had disturbed me many years ago. In the end, what began from a dissatisfaction I experienced as a Geechee girl who wanted to s…
Read More…sorry, that’s just not the language an evangelical marriage crusader would use. They would use terms like “sanctity” and “traditional marriage” and “God’s design” and all that. Not that mushy “values we hold so dear.” It’s not just values we hold so dear — it’s God’s command, God’s plan, God’s design for men, women and the family. (Have the Iowans for Christian Leaders in Government read anything Vander Plaats has written?) Of course it’s possible…
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…eligious composition of the nation. The first half of Tri-Faith America focuses on the early-twentieth-century battle between those who considered the United States a “Christian nation” and those who pushed for the tri-faith concept. The forces for unity and exclusion were numerous and powerful. A resurgent Klan was led by men like Hiram Wesley Evans who wanted the nation to be a “Native, white, Protestant supremacy.” Antisemitic and anti-Catholic…
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…described the ‘Islamic State’ as “not Islamic” it was not necessarily because of a lack of understanding of the group, but because of an awareness of the power of his words to affect the lives of the millions of Muslims in America. Wood does not acknowledge the power his words have in constructing the “reality” they depict. That is, he is not simply describing the Truth, but helping to construct it. In her essay “Representing Fundamentalism: The…
Read More…ntly, and the simplistic use of it seemed too manipulative. Now I’m beginning to wish it were true. What if our enemies really did just hate us because we believe in freedom? Get a grip people—maybe it’s not too late….
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…that Trump is such an artist, but it’s the other way around: Trump didn’t use the religious right to win the presidency; the religious right used Trump to get what it wanted. And this itself is nothing new, despite claims to the contrary which, we think, has more to say about the commentator than the subject in question. Although it may be convenient and more than a little self-serving to view Trump as an aberration who doesn’t align with desired…
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