Religion Dispatches
…this desire many of us have to show that we are open-minded and fair, that represents one key psychological source of the temptation to engage in false equivalence. The fact remains, however, that the distortions resulting from false equivalence can be just as damaging in international comparisons as in domestic politics. The American LGBT community and its allies can continue to fight for improved conditions in the US while recognizing that the c…
Read More…even have the courtesy to check Trayvon’s phone for his mom and dad’s telephone numbers because it’s just a black criminal’s body to them. While Zimmerman the trigger man slept in his bed, the police ordered a drug and alcohol test for Trayvon’s lifeless body. A black body that was representative of evil against the whiteness of George Zimmerman. I hesitated to write about this story, because there are many good stories about Trayvon and his pare…
Read More
…beheadings. Krieger reads such rage within a dichotomy of “fundamentalist repression” and its opposite, freedom. Alhough she prefers the phrase “over-pervy libertinism” as, for her, the dichotomy is spread wide, with ISIS on one end and the antinomian carnival of de Sade’s vacation home at the other. That’s a freedom worth fighting for, she implies, but it is far from free. Inherent in Christianity—in the system of thought, not just its history—a…
Read More…volved is keeping details of the ceremony and its location secret. El Pais reports that a married gay couple from Spain is reportedly stuck in legal limbo in Mexico, where a woman acting as a surrogate mother gave birth to twins on January 6. The state where the children were born recognizes surrogate births but the federal Secretariat of Foreign Affairs, which is responsible for passports, does not. Surrogacy is illegal in Spain but children born…
Read More
…most Catholic health care institutions have accepted the accommodation, a number of the nation’s 260 Catholic institutions of higher learning as well as Catholic nonprofits are seeking a broader exemption that would in effect bar their insurers from providing contraceptive coverage as specified under the accommodation designed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a consolidated case challenging th…
Read More
…ic to the Chiapas rebellion. The Mexican pattern of closing seminaries and replacing bishops was repeated throughout Latin America, as the Vatican dismantled the infrastructure of the theology of liberation. In his previous capacity as Jesuit provincial in Argentina, Pope Francis himself had labored to contain the liberation movement. As head of the Argentine bishops conference, then-Cardinal Bergoglio, expressly criticized application of Marxist…
Read More
…little comfort and even less outreach to the afflicted, according to press reports. Black churches were slow to respond, reporters noted, because most believed that homosexuality was a sin. Yet were black congregations any more homophobic than white churches with similar theology? If Jerry Falwell became the media’s right-wing go-to guy, the black churches served as its whipping boy. Academics wrestle with the question of whether journalism reflec…
Read More
…as a result of the new markets opened up by the Marshall Plan and deferred domestic demand, the specter of mass unemployment no longer loomed, though unemployment would continue to be a chronic problem. Even in the boom years of the 1960s there were twice as many job-seekers as there were jobs. And despite the 1963 March on Washington which had called for “jobs and freedom” and Dr. King’s call for a “Poor Peoples’ Campaign,” with his death the mor…
Read More
…ations, and individuals from any attempt to curb or obstruct religious freedom or freedom of conscience which are guaranteed by international human rights laws.” Caruana said that although TEAM was aware that marriage equality will not affect religious marriage, it was still concerned about religious rights. “As Christians we believe that according to Biblical teaching, God ordained marriage as a union between one man and one woman for the reason…
Read MoreWhile a number of conservative Christian leaders raise questions about Glenn Beck’s Mormonism, Worldview Matters’ host Brannon Howse continued his attack in a conversation with Kirk Cameron about why Cameron did not participate in Glenn Beck’s Divine Destiny. Howse marveled at the “thick irony” wherein Cameron (the actor who played Buck, the converted journalist warning about the “demonic spirituality of a one world religion” in the Left Behind m…
Read More