Religion Dispatches
…n had indeed restored its honor. The prayer Lee cited had been composed by New York state officials to be read in public school classrooms at the start of the school day. Lee said the prayer “is not an establishment of any particular religion, but an acknowledgment of a truth, and a debt we owe God.” The Supreme Court, with only a single dissenting vote, disagreed. The Court’s decision appealed to the same founders that Beck and Barton are claimin…
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…economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz crunches Google search data for the New York Times and comes up with some fun statistics about, say, the anxieties of pregnant women (“can pregnant women eat shrimp?” is a popular search query in the US) or the ratio of heart-related to penis-related searches (67:100 for those keeping score). This Sunday, Stephens-Davidowitz turned his attention to God. Some of the patterns he documents are predictable, such as t…
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…ay they “believe in God without a doubt,” broken down by generation: Gen Z numbers drop off precipitously since the late nineties. The second showed the number who say they “believe in some higher power.” Here, Gen Z showed an equally precipitous rise, since around 2012. Thompson’s tweet betrays some exasperation with the apparently contradictory results: “Depending on how you ask the question,” he wrote, Gen Z was either “leading a stunning athei…
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…pertain to preventing diseases and not to … preventing birth.” But, as New York Times reports, under Trump a number of anti-contraception activists have been given prominent roles in the administration. They are moving not just to finalize a rule that would allow any entity to opt-out of the contraceptive mandate for any reason, which has long been on the bishops’ wish list, but have a history of attacking contraception in general. Katy Talento, w…
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…ckfire when people stop making positive changes in their lives because the number on a scale doesn’t change. In terms of ex-gay ministries I think it is the perception that people who engage in these ministries are in deep denial and are self-deluded. Some probably are. But many whom I spoke with who have been in these ministries for years or decades foster no illusions about having become heterosexual. What they do know is that they have made a s…
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…th Texas Women on Facebook, I heard Texas Sen. Donna Campbell on the local news declare that “Democracy was traded for mobocracy” during the successful filibuster. Mobocracy, really? Needless to say, the proverbial line was drawn in the sand, yet again. The orange-clad were directed to arrive at the Capitol the following day, July 2, ready to register their stance on HB2 and, if desired, to sign up to testify before the House State Affairs Committ…
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…being supported and disseminated by powerful media representatives on Fox News and One American News Network (OANN), along with a not insignificant number of elected members of Congress. A great deal of the concern on the part of white people is over their potential loss of status in America. This concern is being expressed in current Trumpist Republican efforts to curb access to voting by people of color and the social panic being fomented about…
Read MoreThe most dispiriting number to come out of North Carolina today was the huge margin of victory for a constitutional amendment that, as Candace has noted, will not only forbid same-sex couples from getting married, but will strip couples of any legal protections that might have been offered through domestic partnerships or civil unions. The broad wording of the amendment is more evidence that anti-gay advocates are lying when they say they’re only…
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…ties lost challenges to similar policies in state courts in California and New York, several Catholic and evangelical universities have sued HHS in federal courts around the country, charging that the contraception coverage requirement violates their religious freedom. While a federal court has yet to rule on the mandate, a ruling issued late Friday night demonstrates how the claim of infringement of religious freedom undermines the First Amendmen…
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…ey and Jan Schakowsky. The doctor said she is worried about the increasing number of restrictions on abortion states are implementing. (To get a sense how women’s access to abortion is shrinking across the country, take a look at this map assembled by the Guttmacher Institute.) Twenty-four hour waiting periods, for example, can cause a woman to miss the one day a week a clinic performs abortions, pushing the procedure off another week and making i…
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