Religion Dispatches
…g for years requirements that he abide by basic building, fire, and zoning codes. So you go back to that Charisma story and the overblown rhetoric about religious persecution, and remind yourself not to take seriously the next thing you read or hear from the Rutherford Institute. And while you can’t be sure, you don’t recall reading that the heat and harsh conditions at Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Maricopa County Tent City Jail had previously moved John…
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…, reads like word salad. For supporters, however, it’s a puzzle of cryptic codes and symbols that unveil a Satanic pedophile ring controlling the government. Beginning in 2018, the mysterious figure “Q” began detailing Donald Trump’s ascent to power and the “storm” that was coming to finally end control of the “Deep State” and corrupt government. Using “Q drops,” the cryptic 8Kun messages used to rally supporters, “Q” offered supposed intel to the…
Read More…tly gender-segregated customs of Mormonism are—like unwritten Sunday dress codes—traditional rather than doctrinal and human rather than inspired. It was also an opportunity to start a conversation about traditional gender inequalities in a community where feminism has been unnecessarily stigmatized as an excommunicable offense. (And for the record, it is not.) Because really, it’s not pants or the right to wear pants that tops the list of Mormon…
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…rementioned regimes are well known for enforcing strict, puritanical dress codes on their citizenry. Saudi Arabia’s toleration of the feared muttawi‘in (“volunteers” in Arabic) is well known. These vigilantes roam the land, harassing those deemed in violation of Islamic norms of modesty. In Iran, a division of the police department exists to enforce sartorial probity, with uniformed men and women wandering like parking cops on the look out for vio…
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…gical schema? Robertson would say that Haiti’s centuries-long struggle for freedom, sovereignty, and dignity is indeed a demonic project—but it would have been hard for captive Africans in Saint-Domingue to embrace the divine character of their colonizers’ Christian God. What the colonial ruling class understood to be either divine or demonic in the Christian pantheon, the enslaved African laborers had to have understood as one and the same evil f…
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…virulent that hatred has become. Americans are willing to throw religious freedom and tolerance out the window, a posture all too familiar in the nation’s history and sadly contradictory to the sacred principles upon which this country was founded. Opposition to the construction of a Muslim community center in New York; the brutal attack on a Muslim cabbie; the proposed burning of Qur’ans by a small church that created a media sensation; the pass…
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…used were nearly all rules and regulations laid down in Levitical holiness codes, in wrath-filled passages from the prophetic literature, and in the Pauline and pseudo-Pauline literature. This heavy reliance on rule-bound scriptural teaching works really well for wannabe moral enforcers, but to recall the words of our Saviour (himself quoting Isaiah): “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” I am no trained theolo…
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…e heard so much more widely and creep into secular life, from school dress codes to abstinence-only education. So those people are likely to be irritated. What alternative title would you give the book? Redemption in Topeka: How the World’s Meanest Church Decided to Stop Anti-Gay Picketing and Spend Their Talent and Energy Ending Racism in the Heart of America. Previous to his anti-gay work, Fred Phelps was a civil rights activist who led consider…
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…uctive technology than the Torah, Talmud, or our medieval and early modern codes could have imagined! Certainly, some things possible in our world had been sufficiently anticipated by earlier Jews that we have a basis for discussion; there were forms of birth control mentioned in the Talmud, for example. And there are even intimations of the questions raised by, say, in vitro fertilization. One ancient text asks about the status of a baby conceive…
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…n Diego, a pastoral and family care center dedicated to “the formation and promotion of Catholic leaders in the Hispanic community.” In her lawsuit, Birge charges that Hernandez was such an involved participant in Centro San Juan that its Director, Luis Soto, referred to him as an employee. Hernandez, who was trained at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California, and the Mexican-American Catholic College in San Antonio, was also the 200…
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