Religion Dispatches
…pirituality. In fact, “religion and animals” themes appear in a surprising number of places—one example is Peter Miller’s article “Jane Goodall” in the December 1995 National Geographic, in which he discusses Goodall’s belief that expressions of awe by chimpanzees at a waterfall site “may resemble the emotions that led early humans to religion.” The debate over whether or not our animal neighbors can be “religious” is but one issue in the growing…
Read More
…kely to gain steam as well, as an Oklahoma congressional panel cleared the way for a vote on an anti-sex selective abortion bill this week). But more important than new ideas was the opportunity for emotional impact. “I propose that we—the pro-life movement—adopt as our next goal the banning of sex-and race-selective abortion,” said Mosher. “Even those who believe in the absolute right to destroy a child under any and all circumstances, it is safe…
Read More
…, self-harm, and suicide among LGBT youth and adults. Of course, a growing number of churches and denominations today have rejected such a destructive understanding of human sexuality. Religion Dispatches recently compiled a list of the official positions on LGBT issues currently taught by various Christian denominations. According to this list, mainline Protestant denominations such as the United Church of Christ and the Episcopal Church claim th…
Read More
…ke expressed expected horror—is that it’s based on scant data. That’s clue Number One that the topic is ripe for conversation and that people of varying views will use Pope Francis’ words to confirm their own positions. A look at the movie offers a context for how to interpret the text. Unless one knows better in advance, it would be easy to conclude from the film that there are just a handful of Catholic women in the world. Evgeny Afineevsky craf…
Read More…rusion into women’s reproductive decisionmaking. Which is a pretty nuanced way to look at, and it’s not one that is immediately friendly to personhood legislation. Secondly, it raises the question of whether we shall see a more general pushback against national groups picking states as laboratories for their legislation. If Oklahoma Republicans wind up galvanized against Personhood USA and Oklahomans for Life, is it possible that another red state…
Read More
…te this, Metaxas’s tweet has been severely “ratioed,” which means that the number of responses far exceeds the number of “likes” and retweets. This is generally an indication that a tweet’s contents are either deeply controversial or profoundly ignorant (or both). In short: Twitter users have pushed back on Metaxas, and they’ve pushed back hard. In response he’s deployed a Trump-ian combination of backpedaling and doubling down on his initial clai…
Read More
…usually doing yoga all wrong—implying that there is an identifiable right way to do yoga—is just too simple and lends itself to right-wing spin. In our critiques of yoga’s appropriation and commodification, let’s target the systemic and global problem of capitalism, as well as the ways entrepreneurs and politicians across the world use yoga to profit off of resurgent fears of others and the concomitant privileging of particular bodies, whether wh…
Read More
…the museum, we have a shofar horn as a sort of reminder that there have always been African Americans in the Jewish community. We also have a number of artifacts from the Nation of Islam as well as other Muslim communities. So the museum reminds us there were African Muslims who were enslaved, making the Islamic experience part of the founding of America. Even though black history is dominated by the Christian voice, it is not the only voice that…
Read More
…how invested Hedges is in the survival of liberal institutions—but either way, it’s hard to see how his intervention is constructive. He poses a lose/lose choice: be a neoliberal tool or a lonely radical taking potshots at institutions attempting to figure out ways to thrive. Granted, a win/win approach that maximizes the benefit of doubt in Hedges’ excluded middle ground is not more illuminating in every case. In fact, a signature problem of Pro…
Read More
…eligion by conquest.”10 Students reading those pages would naturally come away with the idea that Christianity’s spread was more peaceful than that of Islam. In fact, Islam spread at times by conquest (for instance, in North Africa), and at other times through trade, settlement, and missionary work (for example, to Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia). Christianity, too, spread by conquest—most notably, under the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne,…
Read More