Religion Dispatches
…time, there were less than 34,000 Muslims in all of Canada. By 2001, this number had grown to 579,600. While the population of Muslims grew tremendously in North America, we were almost absent from the array of characters portrayed on television. When I was a child, Hadji from reruns of the animated show Johnny Quest, was the only Muslim I could identify on television, with the added bonus that he was also a fellow East Indian. However, I was puz…
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…t to the highest level of interrogation under the Constitution, called “strict scrutiny.” And federal and state laws that create a distinction based on sexual orientation, sex, and gender identity are subject to a level of interrogation slightly lower than the level granted to laws that create distinctions based on race. Some call it “heightened scrutiny.” In a fiery opinion from 2016, U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves issued a temporary in…
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…nsive footage filmed around the world, a viewer can count on two hands the number of women, including two heads of state, who have any semblance of agency and are real actors in cooperation with Francis. Instead, his bishops, secretaries, interreligious colleagues, escorts, and welcomers are all men all the time. It may seem churlish to point out this dynamic in light of Francis’ many good works. But it’s a telltale sign of an institution that nee…
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…val of David Silverman as its president amid allegations of financial conflicts of interest and sexual misconduct in 2018, American Atheists has also been at the forefront of diversifying the secular movement in practicing and promoting a broader, more intersectional approach to secular advocacy. The organization’s staff includes queer people, women, and African Americans in prominent roles. And, as it’s shifted away from Silverman’s “firebrand” a…
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…the Lord your God … You shall have no other gods before me,” directly conflicts with the principles on which the United States was founded. No law—and this would be a law—can tell an American to worship a god, let alone which god. Americans are free to be godless (as a growing number are), or, if they wish, to worship every god from every holy book. Olsen’s commandments would prohibit free expression and art by outlawing the creation of graven ima…
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…
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…The other sixty-one were inspired. A PowerPoint slideshow in another district simply stated that, “The Bible is the written word of God.” Some districts couched their discussion of biblical inspiration in the familiar terms of conservative Protestant notions of biblical inerrancy; as one district’s PowerPoint presentation explained: “Since God is perfect and infallible, an inspired book is absolutely infallible and errorless in its facts and doct…
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…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…
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…activists, GLBT Christians, liberal people of faith. Eventually I had to evict them from my mind just so I could get some writing done. Did you write to entertain, or to inform, or to piss people off? Sociologists often talk about making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. I’d be happy if readers came away from the book seeing dieting as more complicated, and more problematic, than they had previously thought and efforts at sexual reori…
Read More…l these women off, so be it. Each of them will reap consequences, both predictable and unpredictable. None of us can control the effect our words, actions, and images have on other people, so we do the only thing we can do: we gather in communities of common understanding, around people who affirm us and make us feel normal. But perhaps with increased visibility—with nakedness, so to speak—can come increased tolerance, and eventually, an increase…
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