Religion Dispatches
…ontinued for five more chapters concerning interactions and race relations between white and Black Jews during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. Thankfully, Oxford University Press’ readers reined me in, and I was left with the much more compact, and much more readable text as it stands today, which focuses on the period from the nineteenth century to the 1930s. Some scholars may wonder how large these groups were, especially since African Am…
Read More…information in the beginning of the piece rather than the end, would have better served our listeners because it would have given them more context to understand what they were hearing.” Schumacher-Matos puts a fine point on it by concluding: “Spiegel and Gudenkauf clearly worked hard on this story. They simply made some wrong assumptions about what most of us know about sexuality and conversion.” But they should have worked harder—the fault here…
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…g other things, I’m ready for a teaching on global population that doesn’t use abortion or birth control as an excuse for denying the obvious: that our species has now outgrown its box. I’m tired of pontiffs and priests and religious pundits who publicly strain gnats out of their drinking water, but privately think nothing of swallowing a camel down whole. The good news is, if Jesus is coming to preach the Sermon on the Moon, they may all be out o…
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…have asked what the term “evangelical” itself might be a metaphor for. Because regardless of the actual content of any specific definition of evangelicalism, the term is ultimately a social construction not unlike race, gender, and religion itself. And like all social constructions, evangelicalism’s meaning and use impacts how we understand and see the world. So, if we want to stop being surprised by the things that evangelicals do, it’s time to s…
Read More…of faith,” Coakley said in a statement. “These laws also strike a balance between religious freedoms and the rights of individuals to be free from discrimination. In this case, we believe that this family was unfairly discriminated against by the diocese when it refused to sell them property based on their sexual orientation.” In her brief, Coakley said that religious organizations do not have to comply with antidiscrimination laws in matters rel…
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…gelical hypocrisy is doomed to failure, but we keep doing it. We do it because it feels good. Letting off steam against a faceless digital avatar is really the lifeblood of social media after all. It also feels good to get the adulation that comes with a social media pile on. We feel good knowing that other people saw us challenging an enemy in public. But despite the momentary good feels, not much changes. What this social media trope should teac…
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…ds a man of his first lover and evokes a longing that cuts to the heart. I used to think I’d someday sort out the difference between what I believe “for myself” and how I was conditioned to think. These days I don’t believe that clarity is possible. For one thing belief is a snapshot of just that day since beliefs change and we also change our minds. So instead I use the fundamentalist chains binding my brain as a point of creative departure, as t…
Read More…of things the other way around: we believe that the maldistribution (or misuse) of power causes problems in the social fabric. But it’s possible that just the opposite is true. Perhaps because we are so disconnected from one another, and because we have heard ad nauseum that our “safety and success” have nothing to do with those of others, we share power so poorly these days. Block’s approach to setting things right involves getting citizens to si…
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…ed in our political discourse? The answer, according to Jones, is that because some social conservatives are willing to make a tentative step toward reconciliation in the interest of advancing other worthy causes, progressives ought to reciprocate. As the strong in the congregation at Corinth deferred to the weak, apparently progressives ought to defer to conservatives in order to bring them into the fold gently. This tantalizing idea fails on any…
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…itration boards, and ineffective external (non-police) review boards being used to release accused police persons from justice. ○ An end to the standard of reasonableness that allows police officers to shoot to kill Black and other racial minorities on the officer’s assertion that they feared for their life. ○ Pressure on insurance companies to demand changes in police procedures and policies used by police departments that consistently lead to hi…
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