Religion Dispatches
A vicious lack of civility is nothing new in American politics. To rely only on recent memory, conservatives have attempted to frame Obama as a foreign-born Manchurian candidate bent on turning the United States into a communist dictatorship built around his own cult of personality. The scale, media coordination and sheer, unsubstantiated nastiness of Right-wing smears is in its own league, but conservatives have pointed out that the Left is not…
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…checkered but often positive history. The immigrants from India, Pakistan, Brazil, and Ireland I talked with while writing this book are potential partners on all sides of the political spectrum. They ultimately care much more about the bread and butter issues like family, community, and jobs that most of us care about. Anything you had to leave out? Lots. It’s impossible to capture the complexity of people’s everyday lived religious experiences b…
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…ealer,” a secular humanist from Boston who had been educated by Jesuits in Brazil told me. “He’s such an icon for reaching out to people most in need. That didn’t end up making me believe in a supernatural being who gives out miracle cures,” he made clear, “but it’s a big social lesson. It’s really the best side of Christianity.” Indeed, so compelling is this understanding of Jesus to many Nones that in close to a hundred interviews, the story of…
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…t gay priests—“Who am I to judge?”—occurred on a flight back to Italy from Brazil. Most recently in Tblisi, Georgia, the pope referred to the “theory of gender” as a “great enemy to marriage today.” He added that “there is a global war to destroy marriage,” and that the weapons being used are a form of “idealogical colonization.” In the past, Francis has used that phrase to describe Western ideas being forced onto developing nations. While this ha…
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…th these men in community, and served with them in countries like Bolivia, Brazil and the United States of America. Some of these men were afraid of their own shadows, others were hurt by the Church’s millennia of anti-gay theology, but longed for a time when the Church would not contribute to the homeless rate for LGBTQ teens (some 400,000 in America alone). Others sought to work in countries like Russia or Uganda that criminalize same-sex desire…
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…nious relationship by creating opportunities for dialogue at all times.” Brazil: President Slows Anti-Discrimination Bill in Deference to Evangelicals Last Friday, Brazilian lawmakers shelved a law that would have prohibited discrimination or inciting violence on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, reports Dan Littauer at LGBTQ Nation. He reports that the country’s minister of institutional relations instructed ruling party sena…
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…women’s soccer at the 1996 Olympics. The most obvious was the goal against Brazil that staved off elimination in the quarterfinals of the 2011 World Cup: in the final minute of extra time, Megan Rapinoe perfectly placed a long cross onto the forehead of a perfectly-positioned Abby Wambach, who powered the ball into the near corner of the net. Given the timing, the stakes, and the absolute perfection of both the pass and the finish, it is—by far—th…
Read More…inues: The young man was learning Portuguese, to do his missionary year in Brazil, for which he left before graduation. When, after a year, he came back to complete his studies, he took more of my classes and we had further discussions. I wondered if amendments to the Constitution were also inspired. He was a little uncertain, but I think he decided they were not. That poses problems I have often thought of since. For instance, the Constitution ra…
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…he fundamentalists I’ve been writing about have supported in Indonesia and Brazil. And Guatemala. And Honduras. And the Philippines. And Uganda. The reality is, George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush, both of whom I marched against—I got beat up by cops because I was so furious about what they were doing in the Middle East in particular—they were not fascists. They were imperialists. And there’s more than one kind of bad under the sun. I might still…
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…nations with large Evangelical populations, such as the United States and Brazil, than Catholic ones, such as Argentina, Ireland, and Spain. Decidedly less noted, and therefore less understood, are the political roots of the gay backlash. By openly embracing anti-gay violence and extremely homophobic legislation, many autocratic regimes across the world are doing what such regimes have done for centuries to groups as varied as Jews, heretics, and…
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