Religion Dispatches
…opening decades of the twentieth century. These women embraced Victorian ideals of morality, sobriety and outward appearance as a religious-political ethic of self-help. Such a strategy of racial respectability enabled black women to counter racist images of African Americans in the dominant imagination while condemning what they perceived as the immoral manners of the black poor. Hence, in effect, though surely not in intent, this form of racial…
Read More…aditions are always in process of being remade, remixed, and shuffled. Best Creation of Mythology: Epic – Wild and wooly characters, human and not, bound together in the battle of chaos and cosmos, through the congruence of worlds. Best Sense of the Sacred in the Everyday: Enough Said – This film just felt “real,” as if its world was not, in fact, all that separate from the viewers’ world. The magic of the mundane. Best Ethical Compunc…
Read More…faith needs to be out in the world – challenged by the things they see, broken-hearted by the world’s suffering, reaching out to those who are in need, no matter how their beliefs may differ. Cutting ourselves off from the world in the “Best Christian Workplaces” where we can never be challenged only serves to further divide an already partisan world. Anywhere can be the “Best Christian Workplace” – so long as it is a place where our deepest passi…
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…at alternative title would you give the book? Are Diamonds Always a Girl’s Best Friend? Myths of Sex and Jewelry How do you feel about the cover? I love the cover, the way the designer cropped the Ingres painting to make it more mysterious and suggestive. The Indian edition also has a lovely cover, a painting by Raja Ravi Varma of an Indian woman covered in jewelry and smiling seductively. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which…
Read More…haviors that were chosen, by the way. I figure if these are some of God’s “best” and gay and lesbian people are not, perhaps it’s simply because we have a higher standard of morality than God’s “best.” Indeed, I think the LGBT community has far more courage than Osteen, who simply wants to “stay in my lane” and preach the feel-good gospel that keeps the money rolling in. What makes God’s “best,” Joel, is not someone who hides behind a happy gosp…
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…Ways Ministry’s Bondings 2.0 blog reported on what its readers saw as the best and worst stories for LGBT Catholics in 2016. OutRight Action International posted video of a panel discussion on “the future of global LGBTIQ activism over the next four years, Trump’s potential impact, and our strategies for strengthening our community and resilient activism as we move forward.” Many American anti-LGBT religious activists are expanding their global r…
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…d enacted the nation’s strictest work requirements for welfare recipients. Best friend to the plutocrat and ruthless scourge to the poorest among us: that’s Sam Brownback’s actual idea of “national moral leadership.” But I do hope that Rabbi Saperstein is right in respect to the guy’s qualifications for his new job. And at the very least, it will be a great day for Kansas and Kansans when Sam Brownback departs Topeka. _______ 8.4.17 Author’s No…
Read More…oc way, if you think about it). A perfectly fair question is whether it is best to imagine health care as the kind of thing best handled in a centralized or de-centralizedway. But to ask, and then answer, that question fairly, we need to jettison the old rhetorical saws about socialist medicine, government takeovers and death panels. Let the dead bury their dead. There is another question lying behind these questions, and I continue to wonder if m…
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…ent of God’s Kingdom. They see that sometimes vanity can overcome even the best of apostolic leaders. This may be why ICAL declared that titles don’t really matter: [What] matters is that all members of ICAL should be apostolically advancing the Kingdom of God fulfilling the great Commission and be recognized by their peers as apostolic leaders. This expansively political view of the apostolic makes it additionally challenging for reporters seekin…
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…sociopathic question, “Could a plague of biblical proportions be America’s best hope for religious revival?” Meanwhile, in Christianity Today David Roach is celebrating a supposed uptick in conversions achieved by evangelistic organizations that have built web resources for the purpose of deliberately playing on people’s fears of coronavirus as a means of bringing them to Jesus. Extremist organizations are also exploiting the pandemic to recruit f…
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