Religion Dispatches
…ngs) is this: libas al-taqwa dhalika al-khayr, “the dress of taqwa that is best” (7:26). We talked about taqwa already, right: God consciousness which results in certain and actions. You cannot have taqwa without the right to exercise choice. You cannot be said to be a conscientious human being without excising agency. You cannot do what is best about dress unless you are doing it by choice. This is NOT just anything goes though, so long as you ch…
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…tered an old, familiar, sinking feeling. I tried to tell myself it was the best I could do. Was I lying for the Lord? Or was I a regular Mormon struggling to tell a complicated story to a world that often reduces us to stereotypes? What should I have said? Mitt Romney has said, “I can’t imagine anything more awful than polygamy”—even though polygamy remains a live element in Mormon doctrine and practice. Is that what he really believes? Is that wh…
Read More…e impression that this new study has single-handedly overthrown one of the best-documented scientific theories in history. Creationists will no doubt pass out copies of these articles at school board meetings as final proof against evolution, just as the Discovery Institute trumpeted an inflammatory New Scientist cover article (“Darwin was Wrong”) to the Texas School Board during one of its 2009 meetings. Those who attack evolution will be hearten…
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…our husband, or you will die a terrible death. Higher Ground is one of the best representations of religiously sanctioned sexism I have ever seen in film. Corinne’s thinking, behavior, and clothing are disciplined throughout the film—by her parents, by her husband, by her minister, by the counselor, and by other women in the congregation who silence her and tell her the dress she wears is too revealing (never mind that it is a floor-length billowi…
Read More…those young people will experience. The booklet has been designated as a “Best Practice” resource for suicide prevention—the only one of its kind for LDS people—by the Suicide Prevention Resource Center and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. I spoke with Dr. Caitlin Ryan of the Family Acceptance Project at SFSU about the research and the reasoning behind this groundbreaking resource. I noticed that in the booklet you characterize hom…
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…at we have to “try on” alternative interpretations to see which offers the best fit with the whole of human experience—not merely with what we experience through our senses, but also with the broader and ultimately more important dimensions of our lived experience, including our moral and aesthetic experience and our sense of the numinous. Is a naturalistic worldview, one which explains away these latter features of our lives (or at least the last…
Read More…point is that people can leave whatever it is that God calls less than His best and move into something that is His best, becoming more like He is. Honestly, this isn’t news. So-called “ex-gay ministries” have long given up the promise of turning homosexuals into heterosexuals. True, some who say they’ve “left homosexuality” have married opposite gender partners and had children. Here we can begin the long argument over Alfred Kinsey and his conti…
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…where it was published soon after it appeared in Israel, the book became a bestseller. Sand was given the Prix Aujourd’hui—a prestigious literary prize awarded to the best nonfiction book of the year. As French history is Sand’s field, and he is thoroughly at home in French language and culture, his television and radio appearances were quite successful. But the French Jewish establishment was quite critical of the book. From Brooklyn to Jerusalem…
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…er told us how to vote, he gave us all the good common sense to choose the best leaders.” It’s important to emphasize that best doesn’t mean perfect, as Abraham, Moses, and David would remind us. The assumption of God’s providence, however, doesn’t work both ways—that is, it can’t be positively applied to Trump’s presumed opponent, Hillary Clinton. That may seem inconsistent, at least on the surface: if God chooses imperfect people, then can’t God…
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…Fondakowski, “Just put your cap forward and keep moving.” But perhaps the best way to understand this text is to view it as the story of a small group coming to grips with a mass cultural trauma. As a number of notable sociologists put forth in their book Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (University of California Press, 2004), society, to put it simply, can experience trauma like an individual can. As with the individual, there are a few t…
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