Religion Dispatches
Back in 2009, I called Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue promotion the “bus tour of destruction,” noting that her “worldview is not about creation and building,” but about “destruction and dominion.” For dominion to take place, I wrote, “the current order, especially the Democrats’ version of government order, has to fail. What most liberals, Christians included, don’t understand, is that destruction paves the way for a new order ordained by God accordin…
Read More…rainbow flag as a symbol. The rainbow shows up in many flags including in Peru and Ecuador to represent Incan territory. It has also been used by the peace movement as well as the International Cooperative Alliance. What all these uses have in common is that the rainbow flag represents diversity, as Morse rightly claims. However, the overarching meaning of the rainbow flag is one of inclusion. When gay and lesbian people fly the rainbow flag they…
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…injured or killed in the Oak Creek shootings. Everyone in the community is welcome, and non-Sikhs are invited to show their solidarity. Just underneath that announcement of welcome, the “Law Enforcement Training Video On Sikhism” is posted. The description of the video reads: Awareness of cultural and religious observations, including those of Sikhism, can help avoid misunderstanding and tension—assisting the public in understanding the challenges…
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…rite is simply to point to Jesus’ statement that “I was a stranger and you welcomed me…as you did it for one of the least of these, so you did it for me.” But even though they live at the quick of the faith, justifications are less interesting than simple facts on the ground. We had a community ready to welcome strangers in need with open arms, which is what everyone says Christians should do. But now comes the governor and a wave of his colleague…
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…an disagree.” Retief, author of the new memoir The Jack Bank, said he felt welcomed and accepted, “because I felt the center of gravity of the mostly young, cool, hipster social justice-supporting attendees was overwhelmingly pro-queer. I thought Campolo and his cohorts were on a bit of an intellectual island… Pro-queer statements got cheered at panels; antigay statements were generally met with silence.” But not every emergent-church hipster unif…
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…hal, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio, framed questions of welcome, evangelism, and Christian identity this way: If the eucharist is, indeed, a table set in the wilderness, and we are all gathered around it like homeless people gathered around an open fire, then what is to distinguish us from other outsiders who may happen to gather with us? Breidenthal goes on to suggest that the movement toward open communion, rather than being a…
Read More…gn an honor code,” Farris claimed. “[Homosexuals] could not sign our honor code,” Farris said, adding that he considers the actions of gay men and women “sinful.” “Part of the honor code is to be sexually pure,” he added. Baratko speaks to a couple of the bloggers, who say they were inspired by other blogs at conservative Christian colleges like Bob Jones University (BJUnity), and he asks about the challenges of coming to terms with one’s sexualit…
Read More…spoken or written, or by signs or by visible representations or otherwise, promotes or attempts to promote, on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, caste or community or any other ground whatsoever, disharmony or feelings of enmity, hatred or ill- will between different religious, racials, language or regional groups or castes or communities, or (b) commits any act which is prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony betwe…
Read More…. But who is to decide what constitutes a “vice against nature”? The Portuguese legislators had been too coy to mention gay sex explicitly, and so a meaningless clause entered the statute books, which no court could act upon. This year, the Penal Code was rewritten. The new Penal Code sweeps away a great deal of the musty colonial legacy, including the mention of “vices against nature”. Now not even the most contorted of arguments could claim that…
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…in Taiwan, where the Constitutional Court ruled last month that the civil code restricting marriage to ‘a male and a female’ is unconstitutional. The Court gave legislators two years to amend the Civil Code. The article says, however, that “the Court’s arguments for same-sex marriage were not entirely straightforward and left room for further interpretation”: It could be that this was due to the Court’s desire to cool down the same-sex marriage d…
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