Religion Dispatches
…ns of the brain that remain unactivated in the rest of us. There are any number of weird implications and outright contradictions in these sorts of studies. The first is this: do the authors of these studies believe that religious belief or practice has the power to effect the size of the human brain? If so, that would seem to grant an astonishing power to religion to effect real world, and very nearly miraculous changes. Or perhaps the claim i…
Read More…Eleison Group, who the RNS article notes worked doing faith outreach on a number of Democratic campaigns in 2006 and 2008 but not in 2010. In both the RNS interview and in an article on Huffington Post, Sapp argues for a causal link between lackluster faith outreach in this election cycle and Democratic losses; his conclusion: “the results were disastrous.” To support this argument, Sapp claims the following: Compared to ’06, Democrats nationally…
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…ve and liberal factions was created by the church itself, initially by the nonsensical Humanae Vitae encyclical. The church’s decision to ban birth control despite the recommendation of Catholic theologians and committed lay people taught Catholics that the Vatican was more concerned about power and male privilege than either theology or Catholics’ actual lived experience of their religion. Is it any wonder then that, when Roe v. Wade legalized ab…
Read More…ghpoint, but rather as members of a heretical and unchristian faith. For a number of reasons, including Mitt Romney’s presidential run in 2012, those impulses have been largely diminished. But evangelical worries about Mormonism remain. That Mormons have so thoroughly repudiated Donald Trump while American evangelicalism wrestles with its complicated relationship with him only elevates evangelical leaders’ concerns about the strength of their fait…
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…roy their societies. Lively prays that Uganda will be the first country to stop them. Many politicians and preachers have taken up that challenge. At one rally a speaker asks for a show of hands—who’s willing to go kill gay people? One loving religious voice in the film belongs to Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, whose public support for LGBT people cost him his position in the Church of Uganda. Ugandan gay rights activist David Kato was murdered whil…
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…houris, dark-eyed women. We all know that Mohammad Atta, who flew American Airlines flight 11 into the Twin Towers on 9/11, was inspired by this promise. But among progressives, the sex promised to the righteous in the Qur’an isn’t sex as we know it, but something mysterious and sublime for which sex is a poetic stand-in. Second, what happens to our bodies in heaven? This is my favorite part of the heaven conversation. For if you believe in heaven…
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…other parts of right-wing media. It’s not that ideas like Robertson’s have stopped circulating or that White evangelicals have stopped being the GOP base—but this loss does relate to the rising demographic trend of people becoming religious “nones,” due to widespread disgust with Robertson’s brand of Christianity. Overall, though, I think this piece holds up quite well—especially in its stress on Robertson’s role in building the Fox News empire an…
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…nine on the Richter scale. It devastated the population. Estimates of the number of people killed range from 10,000 to 100,000. At the time the quake struck, worshipers filled the churches honoring their dead. The churches, the worshippers, and the city around them were effectively destroyed. Not long after the major quake hit, a tsunami followed that killed those who had rushed to the beaches in fear to avoid the havoc of the earthquake. The cat…
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…ere. You can talk about and think about Muslims as you want, but you can’t stop Muslims from building a mosque. You can hate Muslims from the comfort of your house, or publicly, but when that becomes stopping Muslims from building a mosque, or worshipping, then we are crossing the line into something else. How do you feel Hollywood deals with diversity—is it getting better, or is it getting worse? We are definitely seeing more diversity today, in…
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…tan, including drone attacks, the specific subject of her question! It was none other than Martin Luther King Jr. who called America, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Of course, he was also called an anti-American domestic enemy for doing so. I saw many people laugh at Hamas’s complaint about being compared to America, and while America is a democracy and Hamas is a terrorist organization, Americans might consider our own hi…
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