Religion Dispatches
…slipped into the dorms we couldn’t get signed into, and posted hundreds of cheap notices printed on 8.5 x 11 paper. We’d invited a prominent imam to speak and ordered a delicious dinner, convinced that the perpetually elastic undergraduate stomach would be the gateway to the soul. The next morning, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were struck, thousands were murdered, New York City went into lockdown, and our community was sent reeling. Eve…
Read More…even have the courtesy to check Trayvon’s phone for his mom and dad’s telephone numbers because it’s just a black criminal’s body to them. While Zimmerman the trigger man slept in his bed, the police ordered a drug and alcohol test for Trayvon’s lifeless body. A black body that was representative of evil against the whiteness of George Zimmerman. I hesitated to write about this story, because there are many good stories about Trayvon and his pare…
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…igrant caravan. Across the ideological landscape of Trumpism, there roam a number of such specters—not only “socialists” and Soros, but “globalists” and “Cultural Marxists,” among others—painting a picture of rootless, nefarious forces on a mission to subvert traditional American values. We’ve seen this before. Throughout the 20th century, insurgent far-right movements deployed conspiracy theories about shadowy socialists, cosmopolitan financiers,…
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…ogy of Opus Dei. It is no surprise that Pope Benedict comes from a country—Germany—where the percentage of Church members attending Sunday mass is one of the lowest in the world. Strict adherence to orthodoxy will not be popular. In an odd parallel, Benedict’s view of the Church resembles the ecclesiology of the Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas, who argued that the Christian church should focus on creating a community of character that stric…
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…rching Quiverfull, I read many fundamentalists who took that charge seriously enough to counter it, and tell women that there was no such thing as freedom, but only slavery to sin or to God. Koonz’s book is a meticulous history of women during wartime Germany—the resurgence of patriarchal gender roles, their movements for and against these roles, the politicking of Germany’s versions of Phyllis Schlafly, angling for power with male leaders as they…
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…d. Although Magufuli has not said anything publicly about homosexuality, a number of his appointees have made harsh remarks. Critics of gay rights say this nation — which has large numbers of Muslims and Christians — must protect traditional values. In an August speech, Paul Makonda, the regional commissioner of Dar es Salaam, the capital, threatened to arrest people who were linked to gay men on social-networking sites. “If there’s a homosexual w…
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…ate, an ancient institution revived by Vatican II. In 2000, 341 of Mexico’s 800 deacons served the Diocese of San Cristobal, the largest number of deacons in any Catholic diocese in the world. Vatican suspicion of Bishop Ruiz’s liberationist pastoral strategy resulted in a failed attempt to remove him in 1993. The deacon program came under particular scrutiny after the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, with reports that Maya catechists defied th…
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…and nuns, Christian and otherwise, live in monasteries and convents; and a number of historic Protestant churches, especially those best endowed financially, provide parsonages. But over time, an increasing number of clergy have made their own living arrangements. Churches found parsonages prohibitively expensive; congregants preferred to see their donations go toward services rather than clergy housing; and new religious ventures, especially the…
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…most Catholic health care institutions have accepted the accommodation, a number of the nation’s 260 Catholic institutions of higher learning as well as Catholic nonprofits are seeking a broader exemption that would in effect bar their insurers from providing contraceptive coverage as specified under the accommodation designed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a consolidated case challenging th…
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…fied as AIDS, did not receive ongoing or thorough coverage. By 1982, nearly 800 AIDS cases had been diagnosed. According to one study, infants and children were increasingly infected. Although a threat to the general population was quickly dismissed, the implication was clear: anyone could be infected. The epidemic had exposed social and cultural fault lines that made coverage more than just a medical story. Its initial outbreak in the homosexual…
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