Religion Dispatches
…aps more acutely than most the urgency of these issues. Twitter is tackling solvable problems where they can. I believe that as a culture we need to approach this issue on two fronts: we must continue the practical, on-the-ground conversation of how to remove illegal, hateful, or violent speech from social media quickly and at scale, while continuing to consider why this is done and how it is justified….
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…all around us is no more than a platitude. Pick your apocalypse: zombie apocalypse, any number of post-apocalyptic worlds that crowd our television screens, movie theaters, and book stores, or, perhaps more traditionally, the apocalypse associated with the Second Coming. Think of the 2011 Family Radio Billboards: “He is Coming Again! May 21, 2011.” Or the tongue-in-cheek bumper sticker: Jesus is Coming, Look Busy. During the last week of January 2…
Read More…flood-ravaged Pakistan, which is 98% Muslim. To make matters worse, a local Southern California LDS Church representative who had pledged to join seventy other religious leaders at Friday’s interfaith press conference against Islamaphobia failed to show. Certainly we can do better. Whatever one thinks of the Park51 Islamic community center (and the project is not without problems, as my RD colleague Hussein Rashid pointed out in this must-r…
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…s, you have to take this fragile Western construct (religion), put a numerical scale on it, and then apply that scale around the world, as if religion were a solid, universally measurable thing, like the force of gravity or the density of water. Judging by the paper, Decety and his colleagues haven’t even recognized this problem, let alone addressed it. Instead, they just grabbed a handy global-religion-quantifier and went to work. The metric they…
Read More…“The Pastor” will emerge when the doors of the church open. Despite my sarcasm, I can tell you that this is the story in many a black church on Sunday morning. So before Steve Harvey and any of that jackleg, scripture-spouting, church-hoppin’, marriage-worshipping crowd starts to talk about how I am a hater, please, please tell me how getting a husband is going to change this horrific situation for millions of black women in this country. As for…
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…the lives of its practitioners changes across historical periods, geographical locations, and in relation to other social forces. We can see this clearly in the case of Hinduism’s complex and changing attitudes toward homosexuality. Same-sex attachments and desire were both known and generally tolerated in ancient and medieval India, as reflected in such sacred texts as the Kama Sutra and Krittivasa Ramayana. It was not until India came under Brit…
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…t to the university brought long-overdue national attention to this Republican callousness. More recently, three Republican senators, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Rick Santorum (all currently running for US president) received campaign donations during the last several years from the head of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group reported to have served as an inspiration for the 21-year-old white supremacist arrested for the n…
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…nalist Lauren O’Neal decided to compile an anthology of essays by exvangelicals, former Catholics, and others who have moved out of institutional Christianity and into the liminal spaces where Nones are usually grouped. As they write in the introduction, when they met, they discovered they had both moved away from the worst aspects of Christianity, what they called “the repression, the shame, [and] the hypocrisy,” due to the realization that many…
Read More…s remained fairly steady in recent decades is “the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants to the U.S.,” which has masked “the large number of people who have left the Catholic church.” According to Pew, approximately one-third of those raised Catholic have left the church and 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics. If you were a business losing one-third of your customers, wouldn’t you want to make some changes? Sur…
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…d to recant in 1633), and the argument over who started it all. (The complicated case of Giordano Bruno is treated at Volume I: 862-972 [he was repeatedly imprisoned after 1593, placed on trial in 1598, then killed in 1600], the posthumous case against Copernicus’s book is treated at II: 1473-1481 [it was prohibited in 1598], and yet most curiously, Galileo’s case is not treated at all. Volume 4 provides an Appendix with a fascinating “Index of Fo…
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