Religion Dispatches
…ebate but it is between the mental health establishment and a much smaller number of traditionally minded religious therapists. However, even if Spiegel had correctly identified the nature and participants in the debate, she still would not have gotten it quite right. To his credit, Schumacher-Matos does a better job when he reviews material given to him by Spiegel and her editor Anne Gudenkauf. Among other things, Schumacher-Matos read an article…
Read More…base among the non-religious, for example. Drawing in faith-based voters around populist themes would extend the strength. Likewise, Sanders has done very well among white voters, but had a tough time attracting blacks and Hispanics away from Clinton. Create a way to let the people Barber represent feel their issues are being taken seriously, and you have a very durable coalition in the offing. To shorthand things a bit, but find the common groun…
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…and procession to find a few confused and pitifully human old men at microphones still trying to send out impressive puffs of smoke. Within 20-40 years, we will have women priests ordained with the blessing of canon law (not outside canon law as at present). This will happen sooner than previously expected because each act of abuse or cover-up weakens the power of the male hierarchy. Their convoluted reasons for why only men can represent Jesus C…
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…nvited people to sit down, so that they were not standing or congregating around windows. And then you work your best to keep people calm. And there was a point where these white supremacists surrounded the church, correct? Right, right. Could you hear them? Were they chanting? They were chanting down the sidewalks and what-not. But during the church service, you couldn’t hear anything. At some point, there were lots of bright lights outside that…
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…of innovative thinking about gender, sex, and sexuality, who could marry a number of different lenses to create something new. It’s not a strictly academic work by any means; it’s meant to be accessible to people with all sorts of (and no) Jewish backgrounds—hence the glossary in the back. But yeah, there are footnotes. For someone not well-versed in Jewish feminist theory, how transgressive or radical are these essays? Some of them push the envel…
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…ken a much more adversarial stance to LGBT acceptance. However, increasing numbers of evangelical churches are accepting LGBT individuals as members. This development is not without its opponents, however. Many evangelical organizations—most significantly colleges, universities and seminaries—are mobilizing to retain their “religious right” to discriminate against LGBT individuals. More than 30 evangelical higher education institutions have petiti…
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…grandparents, spouses, friends. Our songs and our dearest hopes are built around this notion. But as Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang point out in their wonderful book, Heaven: A History, this idea of a social, or domesticated heaven, is a relatively recent invention—an idea that really took root around the time of the Civil War. From the beginning, heaven was a place where people went to be with God. In Dante’s Paradiso, the blessed reside in…
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…entury. The very success of the revolution produced a punishment by all surrounding colonies and territories worse and longer-lasting than the US embargo against Cuba. The unilateral and widespread embargo thwarted recovery and development for close to a century. Prior to the revolt French-ruled Saint-Domingue-now-Haiti was stripped of its natural resources by French occupation. Subsequent to the embargoes, in the early twentieth century, Haiti su…
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…out? Anything to make a social impact?” I had been on the Daily Show for a number of years at this point, and spoken to a lot of Islamophobes, people who had a lot of misinformation about Islam and Muslims. It was a personal thing to me, and it was an issue I thought I could lend my voice to in a satirical space. Were there any particular misconceptions or fears you wanted to address? There was a lot of stuff about Shari’ah Law, the protests again…
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…more effective if it were honest. And perhaps that would have lessened the number of death threats and other vile correspondences she has received. Second, others have said that she deserved the criticism for its political harm, that this hurts the Democratic party. Perhaps, but that doesn’t make much sense either, because the manufactured outrage made it worse. If a Democratic leader had privately contacted her and said, “Ilhan, you have to clari…
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