Religion Dispatches
…ld soon be feeling the need to leave her home country. Not surprisingly, a number of Western women felt moved to show their support for Amina. An international movement called Femen staged bare-breasted protests in European cities, in which the writings on their chests echoed Amina’s, along with “Freedom for women” and “Fuck your morals.” (Be warned: photos contain nudity and strong language.) But Femen did not have the last word. Almost immediat…
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…tation is wrong. Bulgaria: Pride activists, protected by police, vastly outnumber far-right protesters The leader of the neo-Nazi National Resistance planned a counter-protest to Saturday’s Pride march; last week he urged people to bring “brooms and shovels with wooden handles” to “cleanse Sofia from garbage.” Human Rights Watch has some history: Sofia Pride marchers have faced hateful rhetoric and violence in the past, and only tepid police prote…
Read More…ier might well have declared, offering data on the correlation between the number of pipers in a village and the number of butts in local church pews. Across the pond in the American colonies, religion was not faring much better. In his masterful reconstruction of American religious history, Awash in a Sea of Faith (from which the previous anecdote is drawn), Jon Butler reports that Christianity was “in crisis” in the New World: Pennsylvania aside…
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…ed “to get rid of these people in the society.” Some observers believe the number of sexual minorities may have been inflated in order to whip up opposition to homosexuality which could advance the standing of conservative politicians. Graham Knight, a British blogger living in Ghana, recently wrote that the claim of 8,000 sexual minorities has little support in fact. Knight concluded, in a blog post titled Did Ghana register 8000 homosexuals? The…
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…the sheer scale of the Second World War; and because of the unprecedented number of documents preserved in hundreds of archives and libraries across dozens of countries, this is obviously not the case. The second is that there’s little to no reality behind popular cultural representations of the Nazi supernatural. While many of these representations are exaggerated or erroneous, many others have some basis in reality. In the case of Hitler’s Mons…
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…56 percent of which are women and girls. A smaller, but still considerable number are victims of sex trafficking—essentially, forced prostitution. With increasing frequency, reports of sex trafficking rings in major U.S. cities appear in the media. In major hubs like Houston and New York City, stories about charges and convictions of homegrown trafficking cells shed light on just how widespread domestic trafficking is. Just this week, the website…
Read More…d between atheists and religious communities. Of course, there are still a number of people who are, if not entirely resistant to the ideas in the book, at least deeply suspicious about or don’t see much value in them. One thing I find valuable about Faitheist is that it moves atheism away from the kind of polemic that ends up focusing on truth claims in a very literal way and so mirrors the religious fundamentalisms it would like to dismantle. A…
Read More…eny minority of people may take away their right to tell gays and lesbians that God will send them to hell for all eternity — out of love, mind you. But, then again, anti-gay Evangelicals have a right to be afraid. After all, researchers say the actual number of Evangelicals may well be “as small as 7 percent of the total adult population.” Which means Evangelicals know just how effective a small number of people can be at taking away the rights o…
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…itutional rights.” There are, as with most of Reed’s biblical analogies, a number of basic textual and historical problems here. To scratch the surface: Roman citizenship would have been rare among the earliest followers of Christ; Paul probably was not a citizen himself (this detail appears in the romanticizing later narrative of Acts of the Apostles, but not in Paul’s own letters); and, the “emperor’s household” in Philippians was a reference to…
Read More…d the 2008 election; as I’ve argued before, he gained support across the a number of demographic groups, and it’s difficult to make the case that Obama won because he finally shed the Democrats’ (imagined) hostility to religion. If you’re a religious person whose faith compels you to favor government programs to support the less economically blessed among us, pulling the lever for McCain-Palin probably wasn’t in the cards. To add insult to injury…
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