Religion Dispatches
…al terms. Most tribes, whether of nations or ethnicities or sports fandom, can easily demarcate their membership—it’s the people who look like us, or talk like us, or dress like us. Tribes organized around religious belief have rituals, sacred texts, and physical spaces that all serve to bind the participants together. Atheism has none of these things—most of the time it’s an individual choice, made and kept alone. In my piece, I point out how eve…
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…d became more aware. Only two percent said that they changed their minds because they came to believe that gay people are “born that way.” Visibility and education matter, but positive relationships across lines of difference seem to matter even more. Whether we are in agreement or not, conversation is greatly needed. The kind of tribalism that causes people to be suspicious of those they think are not like them will be overcome through relationsh…
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…ndicates that it is. That may be the one thing that they got right in this case. The U.S. has on the books a number of valuable laws against discrimination in the workplace, and all organizations (businesses, nonprofits, schools, governments) are expected to abide by these laws. Except religions, or so it now seems. According to the Tabor ruling, religious groups get a pass on the law when it comes to employees who are considered “ministerial.” Th…
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…mong the Palestinian population is about the same as the percentage of African Americans in the U.S.A. For a party so concerned with America’s Christian identity, Romney and Gingrich’s dismissal of the Palestinians is part of their broader disinterest in the Muslim world, and its diversities and differences. Namely, most Muslims aren’t Arabs, and most Arab Americans are Christians. You read that correctly. This is important because it’s a tight ra…
Read More…es now include defined benefits for sex reassignment surgery, and the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Association of Social Workers, have declared the denial of such benefits discriminatory. And intersex conditions are likely to increase, since some of them, at least, are related to the use of pesticides. It seems that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is already aware of—and opposed to—tra…
Read More…Bergoglio noted disapprovingly in a 2007 speech. Meanwhile, an astounding number of women in Argentina, women without access to or education about contraception, die annually as victims of botched abortion procedures carried out in secret. If we do dig a little deeper into Bergoglio’s past, we find that he was accused of participating in one of the numerous human rights violations committed during Argentina’s Dirty War (which ended up resulting…
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…attention to the crisis in our jails and prisons. It’s no secret that America incarcerates the largest share of its population than any country in the world. The rampant racial disparities in the criminal justice system and the use of incarceration to address poverty and other social problems is well documented. And our use of correctional facilities as primary mental healthcare providers is a scandal. However, the coronavirus won’t wait for piece…
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…included. Yet the internal consistency of this scholarly debate over what can and can not be properly understood as evangelicalism quickly breaks down in the newer pieces that comprise Parts II and III of the text. Reprints of recent articles, blog posts, and editorials join several commissioned essays in documenting the many ways that today’s evangelicals have failed to comport themselves with classical definitions of their faith. Historian Mich…
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…s of the colony despite promising to uphold newly-won civil rights for African Americans as part of the “Compromise.” Thus the lie that “we aren’t racist” proved useful in the furtherance of the white nationalist cause and anti-Black violence as far back as 1877. Men, who only a decade earlier wore the uniform of the Confederacy to fight to preserve the traditional power relationship between white men’s boots and Black necks, removed their steel-g…
Read More…d” from their callings. With both men being the namesakes of current political candidates—Mitt Romney’s first name is Willard, and Marriott was a close friend of Mitt’s father George Romney—the changes in office led to some speculation that the move was motivated by the Church’s desire to underscore its stated non-involvement in the Huntsman and Romney campaigns. Church spokespeople, however, described the changes as a routine “rotation.” Signs th…
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