Religion Dispatches
…s presidential campaign has rattled the bones of the dead and awakened the spirits from the past, haunting the living in present times of war, economic turmoil, and environmental crisis. A stretch, you say? Unnecessarily morose, over-determined, overly-brooding commentary that profanes the sacrality of children’s fun and games, you think? Historians are not usually the life of the party, but history does shed light in the darkness, and the history…
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…hich 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 yoga advocates and pop culture critics have suggested that popularized yoga reflects only the impuls…
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…the right circumstance to have a baby, a pregnant person has the inherent spiritual authority not to call that particular future into being. Religious freedom law protects religious practices regardless of whether they’re mandatory in any religious tradition or derive from formal religious doctrine. After all, no religious text prohibits adherents from providing contraception in a healthcare insurance plan for employees. As such, while Jewish pla…
Read More…ll about evangelical support for Trump, there’s no doubt it has occasioned spirited debate and real soul searching in evangelical circles. The anti-Trump evangelical movement has been robust and active for several months now, doing everything it can to undercut Trump’s standing among evangelical voters, rally behind his opponents, and celebrate any of his political setbacks. That’s why the near-total silence among anti-Trump evangelicals over his…
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…stitutions for youth will be stripped bare because of lawsuit payouts, and number of vocations, already low, will become even lower because of the stigma attached to being a priest. The test of Moral Credibility has been found wanting, and the handwriting is on the wall. Even the National Catholic Reporter’s editorial page has called for the Pope to provide answers. No doubt about it, this is perhaps the second biggest crisis in “Christendom,” out…
Read More…big tent approach to coverage of American ir/a/religion. But do the Gallup numbers point to new ways we might be thinking about business as usual? Two findings are striking. First: Gallup reported that although Americans felt religion’s influence was declining, many—75 percent—agreed that more religion would be positive for the country. Not surprisingly, churchgoers were most gung-ho about religion’s beneficial impact. But “over half of those who…
Read More…studied and understood. Any doctrine that would be used to exclude a good number of the earth’s people from full equality before the law and God should be very carefully examined. When it comes to gay issues, most Mormons have only the muddiest understanding of what life is like for gay people or about the doctrinal reasons their LDS leaders say and do the things they do. In fact, most Mormons have only the muddiest understanding about what their…
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…itically. One source of dismay for some Catholics is that so many of their number broke decisively toward Trump and were critical to his victory in the Rust Belt swing states. “The Catholic vote went for Trump and many Catholics joined the non-voting defectors. That’s a scandal that calls into question the moral standing and integrity of most—not all—Catholics today,” Marquette University moral theologian Dan Maguire told RD. To many, Catholic sup…
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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…and the church insisted that Catholics opposed the decision, a significant number of Catholics similarly ignored them, having decided that on matters of sexuality the hierarchy wasn’t to be trusted? It’s that split within Catholicism that freed up Catholics to affiliate with whatever political party best met their priorities: social justice issues for left-leaning Catholics and sexual restraint, law-and-order, and a muscular national defense for r…
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