Religion Dispatches
…alled for an increase of a hundred thousand troops, which would double the number presently there. Yet it will still be half of the numbers of Russian troops that the former Soviet Union had deployed in Afghanistan—and it lost the war, dragging much of the Soviet economy down with it. A similarly dismal prognosis is in store for America’s continuing presence in Afghanistan. Moreover, the persistence of US troops in the region will continue to prov…
Read MoreAccording to new census figures, the number of people reporting that they are living with a same-sex partner has risen 52 percent in the last decade. That’s almost 902,000 people who are living all across the United States. Even here in my own incredibly conservative state of South Carolina, the number of same-sex couples increased and a quarter of them are raising children. It’s those kinds of facts that have right-wing media like the Christian…
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…football, or quidditch know well, so can sustained participation in team sports—only here regular practice generally creates a full trinity of psychological, social, and physical wellness. This, as the recent British study reinforces, has not been shown to be the case with regard to religious outlook, which “was not associated with health status to a significant extent.” Indeed, a review of studies of the relationship between religion and heath b…
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…at happens in this story!” The first book sold 8,000 copies, an impressive number for an independent press. The series was then bought up by Bantam Books and re-branded Choose Your Own Adventure in 1980. An initial marketing push gave 100,000 copies of The Cave of Time to librarians, who loved the concept and the effect it had of getting kids to actually sit down and read. Selling for $2.95 apiece, more than 50 titles were published over the next…
Read More…se who are otherwise staunchly opposed to abortion. With no victories to report—either in Mississippi and Oklahoma, for heaven’s sake!—the personhood movement faces an uncertain future. Others, though, are breathing a sigh of relief. Atlee Breland, of Parents Against Personhood (and past RD contributor) told me that her organization is “so pleased that the Oklahoma Legislature chose not to pass personhood legislation. The extraordinary number of a…
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…ing as Indians, redskins, warriors, braves, chiefs, or savages. Those are sports teams and ah, therein lies the rub. Ray sold this scheme to the unwary because the real experts on Indian cultures have never been Indians. Only non-Indians can be the experts. And experts have repeatedly dubbed what we do as marginal at best—unadulterated savagery at its worst. In the same way sports teams seek to own the balls-out brutality of the Indian warrior, Ja…
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…llowing such a line of reasoning might mean we are seeing an uptick in the number of American’s who will report a life-changing Christian experience while simultaneously being less likely to identify with any particular Christian institution. This raises questions about the complicated relationship between Americans and their willingness to affiliate with large institutions (religious and otherwise) in general. The rate of decline in affiliation f…
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…eventing diseases and not to … preventing birth.” But, as New York Times reports, under Trump a number of anti-contraception activists have been given prominent roles in the administration. They are moving not just to finalize a rule that would allow any entity to opt-out of the contraceptive mandate for any reason, which has long been on the bishops’ wish list, but have a history of attacking contraception in general. Katy Talento, who is now a W…
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…the population of Iberia is descended from Jews will likely take Spain and Portugal by storm…Imagine if just 5% or even 10% of Spanish and Portuguese descendants of Jews were to return to Judaism. It would mean an additional 500,000 to 1 million Jews in the world.” Interestingly enough, one of those who has found Freund’s work fascinating is James M. Hutchens of the Christian Zionist “Jerusalem Connection,” who has been promoting the piece. Why? B…
Read More…to identify myself within a queer narrative was the fact that there were a number of different narratives available to me. Identifying as an atheist, I went through a similar process, but there weren’t the same range of narratives. And I kept meeting other atheists who felt the same way I did—who felt like their identities and their stories weren’t represented in the most dominant atheist narratives. How would you characterize narrative American…
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