Religion Dispatches
…ofiles piece is about an Indiana public school science teacher who had her class last year sing Happy Birthday to Charles Darwin for his 200th birthday last year: When the birthday clip was to be aired, she was informed that it was too controversial and wasn’t permitted. It was too controversial to wish Charles Darwin a happy 200th birthday! The Butler University biology professor invites people who know someone who has stood up for evolution and…
Read More…os Angeles, she recalled, would sometimes reach out to feel her head for horns. Late in her life, she and I talked about homosexuality—we talked about everything—and she recalled back in the 1950s a boy who grew up on her block in her middle-class Los Angeles suburb, a child who she always knew was different, and kindly she asked, “I wonder what has happened to him? I wonder if everything turned out okay for him?” Kindness was the core of her Morm…
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…ns and airtime, Trump is the natural outgrowth of disaffected post-working class isolationism combined with Reagan-era economics. Those characterizations might be partly true but they fail to capture some of the more lasting features of this America, an America whose several discreditings and multiform rage has left all watching scrambling to find an account of things that would make sense of institutional racism, gunplay, Islamophobia, Bernie Bro…
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…ibrary and Museum. Military green dominates the portrait of Sergeant First Class Scott Alan Adams Sr., who served in the United States Army from 1986 to 2008—green background, green eyes, green shirt, green in his hair and eyebrows. Bush’s essay tells how, in January of 2007, during Adams’ fifth deployment, his vehicle hit two landmines laced with white phosphorous, a chemical compound that causes terrible burns. Adams was knocked unconscious and…
Read More…igan that the evocatively named Macon “Milkman” Dead calls home; the cross-class relationship between two African Americans in Tar Baby; and A Mercy, with its accounts of how a pandemic decimated the indigenous people. And of course, there is her masterpiece(s), the loosely connected trilogy of Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. It’s crucial to remember that Morrison’s transcendent genius was the product of black culture, black vernacular, black religio…
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…these days they are going to write the whole thing up and read it to their class and find out if there is anyone who wants to join them. No one is going to listen to what their teachers have to say, or their parents, or the people who write books and articles in the newspaper and can’t think of anything except the same old things nobody believes in. Peace conferences in Madrid, declarations of principles, Cairo agreements, Washington agreements, r…
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…week, Alabama’s governor signed a bill that makes performing an abortion a Class A felony, punishable by up to 99 years in prison. Unlike the Georgia bill, Alabama’s doesn’t include exceptions for rape and incest. While other states consider similar legislation, the timing of these bills is no accident. Their constitutionality will certainly be questioned, but that’s the entire point: force the fight to a conservative Supreme Court, which many thi…
Read More…standards and results in stigmatization or discrimination of any group or class of people.” “Sexual orientation of those we serve or those with whom we collaborate with will not be a consideration during our work. The issue of same-sex relationships will neither prevent us from service children, families and communities around the world, nor obstruct our collaboration with one another and with our partner organizations. World Congress of Families…
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…gravate the situation as part of the political-cum-cultural challenge. The classic case is the variety of laws in a number of countries derived from the colonial era which still criminalize same-sex sexual conduct, even when and where the colonizing power discarded such laws a long time ago. On another front, while care, kindness and consideration are at the heart of religions in their common humanity and linkage with human rights , various interl…
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…ivists for progressive causes need a movement “organized across religious, class, gender, ethnic, and generational lines without trying to pretend that citizens can leave their faiths entirely behind them when they enter public life.” In other words, rather than demand total theological compatibility as a precondition for cooperation, potential political allies should focus on their common problems. Winning theological fights may not be the best u…
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