Religion Dispatches
…tained and boosted Islamophobic views in films from Laurel and Hardy in the 1930s (Beau Hunks, among others) to Disney’s more recent Aladdin and the Indiana Jones franchise. It is so natural, so expected, that most of us have no idea how it affects us. I’ve asked my college students what they think of when they see a scene from a movie in which they hear the call to prayer and see a minaret or dome. The answer? “Something bad is about to happen.”…
Read More
…an faithful to take the time to slow down and to attend to life’s properly spiritual priorities. But there was nothing slow, or especially spiritual, about the July 21st edition of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official weekly newspaper, most of which was dedicated to the very weighty (and altogether earthly) matter of legal reforms that were approved by the Pope in late May, as a response to the current crisis. I have commented before on th…
Read More
…on the frigid evening of the Senate vote. Alas for them, at 4:05 AM on July 15 it must have felt like a cold day in hell when the votes were counted and the exuberant celebrations began. I was among the celebrators in Plaza del Congresso in December of 1983 when Raul Alfonsin was inaugurated as the first democratically elected president after the military dictatorship. I wish I had been there that early winter morning in July of this year when the…
Read More…s in the field (again think condoms being handed out by Catholics) and the official teachings of the Church. In reading it we are also challenged by the abstinence-only policies, for example in Africa, that can accompany faith-based initiatives in spite of a rise in HIV on the continent. At the heart of US involvement is George W. Bush’s 2003 President’s Emergency Provision for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, a $15 billion plan that privileged conservativ…
Read More…National Center for Science Education, under the subject heading “FYI.” An official, outraged over the email, demanded that Comer resign from her position. The issue? The email was about an upcoming talk by Barbara Forrest, a philosopher of science and one of the creationists’ most hated enemies. Forrest wrote, along with her co-author Paul R. Gross, Creationism’s Trojan Horse, a damning and carefully documented account of “intelligent design’s” c…
Read More
…have unfettered access to the young and privileged relationships with the spiritually vulnerable are monitored. Helping professions have codes of conduct, professional associations, and other means of making sure their practitioners are on the up and up. Roman Catholicism needs the same. It will never happen without structural changes. Here’s How it Works… The clerical culture that arises from and permeates the Roman Catholic Church is a key part…
Read More…can’t find any job; among younger males, especially African-Americans, the number is much higher—in many areas one in two workers is without work. Yet Congress, with a Democratic majority, can’t get it together to extend unemployment benefits. Our solons just flew out of town for a weeklong holiday vacation. Republicans, joined by Democratic deficit hawks, insist that any extension be “deficit neutral” and come out of unspent stimulus money. But…
Read More…a shows only 7 million non-Catholic Latinos, representing 22% of all Latinos (down from 25% in 1990), while “nones” were “up from less than a million or 6% of the population in 1990 to nearly 4 million and 12% in 2008.” Might the influence of Latino evangelicals who oppose LGBT rights be overplayed? …
Read More…eing banished from campus. It only faced not receiving all the benefits of official recognition, such as use of limited student activity fees. But the framing is typical of how the religious right pits LGBT rights against religious freedom — insisting the two can’t co-exist, in this case because the CLS can’t require LGBT students to denounce their own “sexually immoral lifestyle.” This has long been the strategy of the religious right, in higher…
Read More…on crime, employment, education, taxes, and health care. First published in 1850 in the provisional state of Deseret (later renamed Utah territory), the Church-owned Deseret News is read by many Mormons living beyond the state of Utah and held in special regard as an especially authoritative “Mormon” take on the news. Sensitivity to immigration issues among Mormons—Anglo, Latino, and otherwise—is heightened by the fact that the Church’s strongest…
Read More