Religion Dispatches
…re was the usual riff that Obamacare was “socialized medicine,” a stunning number of the comments groused about the birth control mandate. There’s significant evidence from earlier Pew Foundation polling that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the contraceptive mandate and the subsequent war on “religious liberty” they ginned up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the…
Read More…t’s not a proud day for freedom of religion when a prominent member of the number two most disliked major religion in America effectively sides against a honest project by the number one most disliked major religion in America. Especially when Mormons have just recently come through our own years-long struggle to build an LDS temple in Center City Philadelphia after Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter tried to extract a six-figure sum from the Churc…
Read More…aception. So is the salient difference the size of the list? Is there some number of things-this-paper-can-be-used-for that puts the employer at a safe moral distance from the act, where previously they had been complicit? If so, what’s the number? How long does the list of possible uses have to be to assuage the employer’s conscience enough to let the employees use their compensation for things the employer finds morally repugnant? See, here’s th…
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…ole.” A 2009 Gallup Poll found “almost no difference between rank-and-file American Catholics and American non-Catholics” in terms of the moral acceptability of abortion, with 40% of Catholics saying it was morally acceptable versus 41% of all Americans.” A 2013 Pew Poll found that just over half (53%) of white Catholics said that having an abortion was morally wrong, which was slightly higher than general opinion (49%), while three-quarters of wh…
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…y relevance of these topics is reflected in the growth of the field—at the American Academy of Religion, a professional association of teachers and scholars of religion, the formal group known as the “Animals and Religion Consultation” has received growing attention, and publications dealing with religion and animals are increasing exponentially. This scholarly work emerges into a context where humans’ attitudes toward our cousin animals are more…
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…s among black women. Said Lusk, “When I began to consider that the African-American population alone has declined in the past three years across the nation, I realized that we’re not procreating our own race; and that is a direct result of abortion in our communities.” During this January’s annual March for Life, Alveda King led a group of demonstrators in laying thousands of roses on the White House lawn to symbolize African-American abortions as…
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…sion of evangelicalism which will be inclusive of LGBT people. There are a number of evangelicals that are very open to this and are having the same experience I had of actually knowing gay and lesbian people, so I think it’s inevitable. I think there will be a sector of evangelicalism that will go past mainline protestant denominations, which have more institutional restraints. The more autonomous congregations will outpace them in acceptance. Th…
Read More…th, for both are part of my devotion to Allah). They do have a substantial number of women included, so I would not complain on that count. But, here’s the thing: there are no women under the category of Muslim intellectuals. Apparently women don’t think. So it is even harder to adjust to the loss of these three men whose intellectual contributions helped to shape the ways we think about and in fact live Islam today; both for women and for men. I…
Read More…in Panama live in the major cities of Panama City and Colón, with smaller numbers in other provincial cities. The Panamanian government does not collect information on its religious composition, but a 2009 international report estimated the number of Muslims at around 24,000, comprising less than one percent of the country’s population. Most are of Lebanese, Palestinian or Indian descent. Though small, Panama’s Muslim community has grown increasi…
Read More…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, the Restoration colonies of New York…
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