Religion Dispatches
…presentatives turned away nearly two hundred Mormon women seeking stand-by tickets to a restricted men’s-only session of the faith’s semi-annual global conference. Mormon women travelled from as far away as New York, Florida, and Germany to take part in the collective action organized by the group Ordain Women as a gentle and symbolic demonstration against pervasive gender segregation in LDS Church administration and leadership. All observant men…
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…y find other people that have a similar reaction. The book does not talk a lot about culture and there are certainly a lot of people interested in that. There’s one deliberate reason for that. Again, as a psychologist I look at endless debates on where [desires] come from, whether it’s culture, biology, psychology, so on. These debates don’t get resolved. What I want to say is that I don’t know where they come from, but I know I can use these desi…
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…s far as you’ve come it’s still a beginning. That’s really true. We have a lot more to come. And a lot more opportunities for growth and expansion, and I’m very very conscious of what is coming next in terms of growing out of this economic repression. Interesting phrase! And people having so much fear about how they will make it from one thing to the next, only faith pulling them out. It is a repression. I call it that because so much of it was or…
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…And you ended up with something different. What happened? DM: I learned a lot writing this book. And I like it much better than the book I started out to write. As a kid I went to Sunday school and we heard about Noah’s Ark and about the Garden of Eden, but without the literal spin. So, personally, I didn’t grow up seeing a lot of conflict between science and religion. That story of perpetual conflict was more something I learned at school. So it…
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…ere not companionship-based. They were economic arrangements. Okay, that’s number 1. Number 2, let’s say that your wife didn’t provide you with a male offspring. A man could take another wife and another wife and another wife until one of them did. This is the “sanctity of marriage” that is being protected. Are you kidding me? Wow. Okay, so that’s Old Testament. Then along comes Jesus. Well for those of us who follow Jesus, I always like to point…
Read More…sion talking about the LGBT people being less than human. For example, the number two person in the state broadcasting company – actually now he’s the number one person – hosted a show devoted to the question of whether it was enough to protect our children to ban homosexual propaganda or whether more needed to be done. He argued that more needed to be done. He said and we need to outlaw blood and sperm donations by them. And if they die in car ac…
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…cation, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourg…
Read More…top thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…
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…is simply groundless. East Africans are among the most adept users of cell phones in the world. The plot twists at the end raise questions about the racial politics of the show. Only a threat of American violence saves the villagers from the tyranny of the local warlord. Only the ingenuity of the white men provides Africans a useful religion. The dewy-eyed boys from Utah share the genius of Joseph Smith: the Yankee spirit of invention. The musical…
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…. Because of my own background in jazz reviewing and performance, I knew a lot of folks, I had a lot of contact information, and so when I buckled down with this research in late 2009, early 2010, I composed what I thought was a really good form email and I compiled a list of addresses. The subject line was “Research Project: Jazz and Religion.” And I got very, very few responses. And I was perplexed. I was miffed. I didn’t know how to go forward….
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