Religion Dispatches
…, you’d know there really is something to this transition. Apparently, the best response is one of surrender. Well, then again, I guess some people would rather go kicking and screaming, trying to resist. Anyway, as I said, my point is about gender and death in the Qur’an. Death is an equal-opportunity supervisor, so every soul will taste it. No special taste on the basis of gender. Thank you very much. We know from the Qur’an that there are two a…
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…ologist for the TED Talk set. And his new book, Focus, is a New York Times bestseller. But before any of that fame, Goleman was a hardcore Buddhist meditator—and remains one today. His early books were about the development of the contemplative path, and throughout his work has run the theme of how meditative practice, in secular or spiritual contexts, can lead to greater happiness and peace—and conversely, how the disconnects in our own minds can…
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…ed for a measure to give women free IUDs. Perriello, on the other hand, is best know as the co-founder of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, which came to attention in the WikiLeaks dump of John Podesta’s emails as the organization Podesta backed to foment a “Catholic Spring.” Catholics in Alliance was formed in the wake of the last Catholic panic, after John Kerry lost the Catholic vote to George W. Bush by five points. Officially, the id…
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…its downfall. Scientific inquiry has to divorce itself from what makes the best story, and science writers, myself included, are in the business of making science compelling by telling stories. It’s true: we report scientific findings in a narrative form. One important point: science is filled with conditionals and religious literature is not. Any religious literature, any revealed scripture, doesn’t have lots of mights and coulds and maybes and f…
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…g down from a high, and literally fell to the floor. “God, I have tried my best to ignore you and to do things my way,” he remembers praying. “I’m broken. I’m broken and in need of fixing.” A classic prodigal son story followed. Tchividjian recommitted himself to Christ, entered the seminary, became a minister. He married and had three children. He started the New City Presbyterian Church, a 450-member church in Coconut Creek. Tchividjian’s “class…
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…received criticism for the book on the grounds that it violates consent at best and allows for a kind of truth of the Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism at worst. Author and blogger Sarah Wendell wrote a letter to the board of directors of Romance Writers of America (RWA) decrying the nomination of the book for RITA Awards in two categories. Wendell, who is Jewish, worries that celebrating such a horrific work creates an environment where writers…
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…ly rejected the claim that allowing trans folks to use the facilities that best match their gender identity leads to any increase in reports of harassment or assault in such spaces. It just doesn’t work that way. In fact, if anyone has anything to fear it should be transgender people since they’re actually more likely than their cisgender peers to be harassed and assaulted in sex-segregated spaces like bathrooms and locker rooms. And with high-pro…
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…ublic forgets quickly, which means that there’s little incentive to create best practice plans and mechanisms for reducing the scale of disasters, since by election time no one is likely to remember. “Voters reward the delivery of disaster relief, but not investments in disaster preparedness,” the authors bleakly conclude. The problem is that most of us see disaster, and disaster response, through a narrative of melodrama. Melodrama is known for e…
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…share those beliefs. Nor should they shape anyone’s ability to access the best healthcare they need in a given situation, to adopt children, or to marry. This isn’t merely theoretical to me. Although I cannot get pregnant, being queer is enough to deter me from seeking healthcare in a Catholic or Protestant hospital when at all possible, since I can’t trust doctors beholden to Christian dogma to care for me appropriately. Catholic hospitals, whos…
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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…
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