Religion Dispatches
…oked. There are ghosts and graves in the yards of my neighborhood, and the number of skeletons—reclining on lawn chairs, sprouting up from the ground, beckoning from the shadows—has transformed the suburban landscape into a set for a George Romero film. In addition, and beyond bland suburbia, monsters, ghosts, skeletons, vampires, and other playful dead inhabit stores and sell products, entertain across the television dial, and instill a dreadfull…
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…amani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute, named after his wife who had died in 1973. The Institute, which functioned as the center for teacher training, greatly augmented the number of yoga teachers who received official training in Iyengar Yoga and became the headquarters from which to disseminate the Iyengar system. Today, there are thousands of Iyengar Yoga teachers and millions of practitioners in over seventy countries across the world. Some yo…
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…aw. Religious exemptions from abortion bans offer relief to only a limited number of individuals and can never be a comprehensive legal solution to the country’s reproductive health crisis. Nor should the right to control one’s body depend on proof of one’s religious commitments; reproductive freedom is a right that depends on one’s humanity, not one’s religious beliefs. That said, attacking the status quo incrementally proved to be a winning stra…
Read More…d and third most Mormon states, Idaho and Wyoming, where he lost to Cruz by 18 and 59 points, respectively. To add insult to injury, a recent poll conducted by the LDS Church-owned Deseret News found Utah would vote for a Democratic candidate in November over Trump. Utah hasn’t sided with the Democrats since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide election in 1964. Why have Mormons rejected Trump? As Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins explained over the weekend, while M…
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…and brimstone preachers of science), the film manages to build a case that: 1) it is un-American to omit discussion of intelligent design from Science and the science classroom and 2) ‘belief’ in evolution logically leads to atheism and even the Holocaust. Yes, you read that correctly, the Holocaust. The movie gets so much wrong here—in the science, in the framing of the issues, even in over-dramatizing and misrepresenting the cases of the ruined…
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…but I refrained from intruding into their Juneteenth experience. The small number of White individuals, couples, and families often looked uncomfortable navigating the happy, jubilant, celebratory mass of Black bodies regaled in red, black, green, and gold. Was this a South Carolina anomaly? I doubt it. According to one poll, 51% of Americans had no plan to celebrate (and more than half of those respondents declared that “they would not take part…
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…lture of extreme secrecy has prevailed, codified in Vatican norms issued in 1962 requiring secret investigations and prohibiting any report to civil authorities. Will Pope Benedict XVI set in motion any change to canon law? Will he step down or ask any complicit bishops to resign? Will he even order a Church-wide investigation? Unlikely. Instead, his moral authority will continue to erode. The number of priests will continue to dwindle. Catholic w…
Read More…ts about LGBT issues. Many are still thinking like we were taught to in the 1970s, that homosexuality is simply a base perversion, an abomination, and can be changed through repentance and prayer. Not so, say a legion of LDS LGBT people who have knees bruised and calloused from so much praying. Most straight LDS people have not grappled with the reality of LGBT experience. And another thing that has not happened yet in most LDS communities is a fr…
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…of the Catholic vote in key swing states. In Wisconsin, it would have taken 18 more Catholics per parish to swing the outcome Clinton’s way, and in Pennsylvania, 34 more Catholics per parish. In the end, maybe it’s helpful (or not) to realize, as Dan Maguire recently wrote, that there’s nothing new in dramatic, disconcerting swings in history: The Exodus story in the Bible (when not misunderstood as history) is a metaphor for human societies. Prop…
Read More…if lost or stolen, but only if you first write down each and every serial number. Then you have to keep this information somewhere that’s not the same somewhere you keep the checks. But then they really do NOT spend just like cash—especially abroad where we meet and mix with people in their own places. Such places are not subject to our being guests there. So I do tend toward keeping travel cash in an odd place. (No, I’m not gonna share with you…
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