Religion Dispatches
…ia. Detroit isn’t imposing religious values on anybody, one might retort, but in a way that’s precisely the problem. Were this about reasonably objective and/or widely held norms of modesty to which healthy religious values are often addressed, I wouldn’t find it so disturbing. Were Detroit’s finest giving tickets to Speedo-clad gentlemen terrorizing Americas beaches and public pools, I think they’d have a case. I think it’s safe to say that for m…
Read More
…s battle of the budget, the numbers actually matter. Hell, it’s a fight about numbers. And balance. And the virtue of justice. What this latest budget battle, and the question of raising the debt ceiling, and the straw polls are revealing, is just how Tertullian a wing of the Republican Party has become. It not only offers absurd arguments with a straight face, but actually insists that belief in the absurdity of the nation’s fundamental fiscal he…
Read More
…iolence as a spiritual and moral issue and was willing commit to speaking out about it. Schenck, whose organization bills itself as “America’s only Christian outreach to top-level government officials in Washington, DC ,” is a white evangelical with close ties to conservative Republicans. In the film, he describes his “affinity” with Tea Party Republicans; McBath talks about her father, who for decades served as the president of the Illinois NAACP…
Read More
…pass over these as trivial. Still, I am left with a feminist theologian’s duty to think about (perhaps overthink) the scenes. Is this the stuff of real change or is it a way of shoring up a model of church that has endured for centuries? Are those who reject the kyriarchal model as I do simply to be told like other protesters before us that we can go elsewhere when we are as Catholic as the Pope? Where are the women theologians called in to consul…
Read More
…ow religion and politics might connect through a range of issues that lie outside of the religious right’s standard abortion/homosexuality/family rubric. Running a successful campaign for office depends on being able to identify and reach out to unified political constituencies. As long as the religious left is less unified than the religious right, it will be much easier — and more expedient — for politicians to speak symbolically to conservative…
Read More
…sday afternoon talk in no uncertain terms that the students are correct about what the law and Constitution require—their right to free expression was violated—and that Wendler and Kacsmaryk are wrong. After providing an overview and history of freedom of religion and the separation of church and state in US constitutional law, Seidel moved on to discuss the Christian Right’s abuse of these key concepts. He noted how the weaponization of “religiou…
Read More…us should be only on communications related to the HERO petition process. But on Twitter, Greg Scott, ADF’s vice president for media communications, cautioned his followers not to believe that the city would narrow the subpoenas. Scott pointed to a Parker tweet time-stamped around midnight today, reading, “If the 5 pastors used pulpits for politics, their sermons are fair game. Were instructions given on filling out anti-HERO petition?-A,” suggest…
Read More
…c “discussions” of homosexuality, someone will stand up and begin to call out numbers. “But what about Genesis 19!” “Leviticus 18!” “Romans 1!” (Those citations refer respectively, and for those of you who have skipped out on church debates, a disturbing story about God’s punishing the sins of a lost city, some prescriptions in the Israelite holiness code, and the Apostle Paul on the consequences of pagan idolatry. Or so the passages read to me.)…
Read More…ver at the Christian Post rehashes all the lies the right-wing loves to spout about lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people. Lest you think he was never gay in the first place, his first paragraph is used to prove his queer cred: “To those who suggest that I never was homosexual, my response is, ‘Does sleeping with over 1,000 men count?’” Actually, no, it doesn’t. Neither the number nor the gender of the people one has slept with in their…
Read More
…t at its own game were quickly invaded and, albeit with great difficulty, put down. Euthanized, as modernity likes to do to the ancient. The Albanian ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, and Tipu Sultan of southern India, great nemesis of British ambitions in South Asia. One of the few countries to escape Western colonization was Japan. Is it, on balance, better that the Muslim world was largely colonized and fell behind, or would we have rather that, po…
Read More