Religion Dispatches
…though this, the men would hover around the tent entries, send notes, make phone calls, actually get their phone cords recharged, and send food and drink through every possible opening in the tent. As far as I could tell, it was always the men hanging around our tent and not the women hanging around the men’s tent. Pretty funny if you think about it. They were like lost puppies without their women. Yet patriarchy would have us think they are the m…
Read More…Tears flowed freely when the Affirmation choir of gay and lesbian Mormons sang the stirring Mormon classic “The Spirit of God Like a Fire is Burning”—the very hymn our ancestors sang to dedicate the Kirtland temple 175 years ago, in 1836, on a day when, as the folklore goes, neighboring villages reported seeing a cloud of fire hovering over Kirtland. Standing in the sunlit white interiors of the temple, Liam, a young gay LDS man who had travelled…
Read More…ition and Focus on the Family, and Jim Garlow, pastor of Skyline Church in San Diego. Also present were Rick Scarborough, founder and president of Vision America, and David Barton, president of WallBuilders; both men have fashioned entire careers out of their denials that the founders ever intended church and state to be separate entities. The meeting (as reported on the website) contained more than the usual over-the-top Religious Right rhetoric…
Read More…ing long-term brain injuries if he continued playing. On May 2, former San Diego Charger’s linebacker Junior Seau died in a suicide strongly resembling the 2011 suicide of former Chicago Bear’s safety Dave Duerson. Duerson intentionally shot himself in the chest, not the head, so his brain could be examined for a degenerative disease he feared he had contracted from multiple concussions. Subsequently he and twenty other former NFL players were dia…
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…riend of mine linked to this article by Stephen Smith of the University of San Diego. In a nutshell, Dr. Smith’s article makes the point that the discussion on gay marriage has inappropriately focused on the issue of “equality” and should redirect its attention to the definition of “marriage.” As one can deduce from, say, the strategic placement of this link in paragraph 14, the implicit argument is that marriage is best defined as a one-man-one-w…
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…est boasted online of his March arson attack on a mosque in Escondido, San Diego County. So, Earnest wasn’t prepared to leave matters to Providence here, either, but instead nudged it along by seeking to replace the new Muslim replacers all the while making sure that the long-replaced Jews in Poway stayed securely in place. So however sincere the Earnest family may have been in absolving their religious community of any connection to the Poway att…
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…hood.” I’ve lived, you know, like, among the straights. So when I moved to San Diego it was like okay, I’m going to I’m going to live in the gay area. I’m going to reach out to gay people and to gay Christians. In the gayborhood, (my partner) Josh and I don’t worry about being in public together. Like, holding hands, we don’t have so much fear of doing it. We don’t get looked at. We’ve certainly shed any sense of guilt that that we might have had…
Read More…onomic Armageddon: What Bible Prophecy Warns about the New Global Economy, San Diego megachurch pastor, radio host, and Tim LaHaye protégé David Jeremiah likens Social Security to a Ponzi scheme and adds that “financing massive entitlement programs, wars, and runaway big government” were “predicted twenty centuries ago in the New Testament letters of James” and figure “prominently as a sign of the coming economic Armageddon.” The book is a favorit…
Read More…e the trip from the Midwest to the west coast to protests to at Comicon in San Diego where they were met with a mocking counter-demonstration. At issue is the right of families of the deceased to mourn in private against what is clearly political speech—although legal efforts to stop the church’s protests were not raised when the target was gays but only now the target is the families of soldiers. Of course, if you watch South Park (or if you are…
Read More…heists. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found a war memorial cross in San Diego unconstitutional because it was a government endorsement of religion. The Army’s “spiritual fitness” test is coming under fire from church-state organizations who claim it is unconstitutional. Despite the new Republican majority in the House, the religious makeup of the 112th Congress is about the same as the previous one. Like the rest of the country, Congress has a…
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