Search for "breaking newstoday cleantalkorg2.ru bbc news Read Breaking News Today news today Politics Stock Market breaking newstoday"

Everyone Should Know the Story of Cary Crall

By Joanna Brooks

…trict Court issued his ruling overturning the same-sex marriage ban, Crall read the ruling in its entirety, paying close attention to the ruling’s numerous “findings of fact” that showed many of the major claims made by Proposition 8 supporters unsupportable by evidence. Walker’s ruling moved Crall to put his thoughts to paper, working with editors of the Brigham Young University student newspaper the Daily Universe to produce an editorial asking…

Giving Up God—Not Just a Spiritual Stunt

By Becky Garrison

…t that links your quest to Pascal’s wager and the context of your quest in today’s spiritual marketplace? Linn Marie Tonstad suggests that I am participating in a postmodern marketplace of religious ideas, choosing my “beliefs” from a smorgasbord of options. But then in the last sentence she seems to suggest that there might be a “marketplace” motive to my actions—that I might stand to benefit in the marketplace from my yearlong experience of athe…

What was Pants to Church Sunday Really About?

By Joanna Brooks

…To learn more about what Wear Pants to Church Day was really about, please read this and this and this and this. And to learn about what Mormon feminists care about and what they mean by inequality, read this and this and this and this—and remember that there is diversity among Mormon feminists: we do not agree on everything. And if you really want to learn even more about Mormon feminist thought and history, by all means, please read this and thi…

Jewishness Per Square Inch, Medieval Edition

By Sara Lipton

…visual stereotyping. Although I certainly hope my academic colleagues will read and learn from the book, I wanted it to be accessible to general readers. I care very deeply about the subject – it’s too important to keep to a specialist audience only. Are you hoping to just inform readers? Entertain them? Piss them off? I expect to surprise some people; I certainly hope to interest them! And also to make them re-think some received wisdom. I have n…

The Mystic in the Rye: JD Salinger’s Religious Fiction

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…tally religious in nature, a point still lost on far too many contemporary readers. (A marvelous exception is Anne Carson; if you want to see what Seymour-like poetry might look like, then read any of her books, but especially Eros the Bittersweet and her more recent work, Decreation). Plato, it is important to recall, famously admitted in the so-called Seventh Letter that he never wrote what he most believed, because words do not lend themselves…

Prophet Muhammad

By Amina Wadud

…k people get the wrong impression because of controversies like the Salman Rushdie affair, or the Danish cartoons. I don’t know how the importance of the Prophet gets lost in the zealousness of certain defenders, but trust me, this is not about freedom of speech. I have absolute confidence that you can understand that freedom of speech not only means you can say whatever you want, but also that certain things you say could have consequences. So, f…

Searching in Vain for a “Pure” Elie Wiesel

By Martin Kavka

…at he could not see morphing into any other form. But he would not have begrudged others, whether Jews or non-Jews, from taking different positions on Israeli politics than he did. Or at least he should not have done so, given what he stated in an interview with the International Herald Tribune from April 1980: Do not ask me, a traumatized Jew, to be pro-Palestinian. I totally identify with Israel and cannot go along with leftist intellectuals who…

The Heresy of End Times Predictions

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…to discern the signs of the end times in the here and now. First, it’s instructive to note that the New Testament book of Revelation is consistently read in tandem with the Hebrew book of Daniel, the same book from which early followers of Jesus are said to have borrowed his title, “the Son of Man.” Second, though probably first in importance, these books are read, not as psychedelically evocative or literary texts, but as straightforwardly histor…

How a Stars and Stripes Hijab on ‘Rupaul’s Drag Race’ Reveals America’s Troubling Relationship to Gender, Ethnicity and ‘That’ Religion

By Megan Goodwin and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst

…unding” names, Sikhs in turbans, folks who dress in “Muslim garb,” all get read as Muslim. Identifying as atheist doesn’t get anyone who can be read as Muslim out of “totally random” TSA pat downs. This is how we racialize Islam, distilling a billion-person millenium-old global religion into one (terrifying, not-American) thing. So yeah, when Jeff Goldblum looks at Jackie Cox in a hijab and says “that religion,” of course we know what he means. Go…

Mormons Prepare for WA Marriage Equality Fight

By Joanna Brooks

…ations to march in Pride parades in Seattle and Portland. SH: And we’ll be ready to counter misinformation about marriage equality and religious freedom. Our Washington law [SB 6239] already states that no religion shall be forced to perform same-sex marriages. Still, backers of the referendum are trumpeting out misleading arguments about same-sex marriage compromising religious freedom. We will counter those with facts. SL: And doctrine too. Age…