Religion Dispatches
…community organized with the intent to get the decision changed. Their social media efforts went viral, pushing the story to Fox News, and by April 1 it was picked up by The Nation, Salon.com, Slate and influential blogs like Talking Points Memo (TPM) and the ACLU blog. The hospital and the system have been silent* but for an April 1 statement from St. John Health, which read: Consistent with Catholic health care organizations, St. John Health Sy…
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…alization of abortion, but simply the continuation of institutional and social racism. The White Christian academies installed in Southern churches in response to the desegregation of the public schools in the 50s and 60s were, by the 1970s, threatened by the potential loss of their tax-exemptions. Southern political leaders realized that times had changed and that direct appeals to racism were no longer going to work. So the honchos of what was t…
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…facing a misdemeanor charge of contempt of court for continuing illegal racial profiling of Latinos despite a federal judge’s orders to stop. Plenty of commentaries since Friday have located this move in relation to “incipient fascism” (which Charles Kaiser describes as “open encouragement of Nazis… a pardon without even pretending to go through the normal channels of the Justice Department,”) and even as an impeachable offense in its own right as…
Read More…xpense of actual human relationships. But positing the real and the artificial as a binary ignores a crucial component of what makes us human: the metaphysical. Aside from its conspicuous lack of cars, one of the most striking things about Theodore Twombly’s Los Angeles of the near future is its absence of sacred space. Anyone who has spent much time in Los Angeles knows that it’s hard to go a block without seeing a Catholic church, synagogue, Pro…
Read More…people last week after footage of the rainbow flag raising surfaced on social media. The incident took place during a Sept. 22 concert by Lebanese indie rock band Mashrou’ Leila, a jazzy, electro-Arabesque group whose lead singer is openly gay. Most Egyptians see homosexuality as a practice that goes against nature and religion and insist that it’s a social disease exported by a decadent West. At home, most homosexuals keep their sexual orientati…
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…uch groups present themselves as just one more form of “global diversity,” deserving about the same amount of resources as Ancient South Asia or Chinese Religion in the Twelfth Century? Far from being embarrassed that Religious Studies is a good place to study how the history and current practice of Christianity shapes everyday American life, I maintain that this is a major reason the discipline has thrived—both in the past and present. In fact, t…
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…ops to lesbian and gay persons. More than a month has gone by since the media broke the news about a series of gay suicides. During that time, the US Catholic Bishops failed to make a single statement regarding these tragic, preventable deaths. Not one bishop’s voice was raised to condemn a culture where youths are bullied for being who God created them to be and are sometimes pushed by society’s judgments to attempt suicide. Many people have accu…
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…ttee claimed might isolate some SBC members, outraged attendees took to social media and raised hell. Delegates from SBC-affiliated churches, known as “messengers,” were ultimately called back to the convention hall late Tuesday night, where they were told they’d have an opportunity to vote on a new resolution that condemned white supremacy, according to the Dallas Morning News. McKissic was not consulted in the drafting of the new resolution, whi…
Read More…own. A commenter links to the other side of the story, told by the city of Phoenix. And yes, it’s a very different take. The case is not about a small group of people meeting in a home for Bible study, as Rutherford implies. According to the city, it’s about a guy who built a church in his backyard under false pretenses, who regularly attracted as many as 80 people to his twice-a-week services, and who has been resisting for years requirements th…
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…the Washington Monument! Prophet Julie Green, who campaigns with Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, is also a frequent guest on the broadcast of tour regular Pastor Dave Scarlett. She says God has given her word of something dire. In a show broadcast from the Salem, Oregon ReAwaking event in April, she told Scarlett and fellow Prophet Amanda Grace that the nation’s capital is not what God wanted, and that he intends to “destroy W…
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