Religion Dispatches
…down, having failed to advance a positive image of the country.) That the New York Times is reporting on the story indicates how much negative press has been generated; some of the postings are stunningly offensive—and the embassy might be better off looking more seriously into them. Certainly, they do not help the current Israeli government’s declining popularity in the eastern half of the West. More worryingly, the deliberate provocations seem…
Read More…lity and gender. One night this spring I came home late to switch on a PBS news segment about kids as young as 3 years old announcing that they were not the sex they seemed to be. Then there was “S/He,” a feature article in New York magazine, on the challenges presented to the parents of such children, including whether or not to allow them to use drugs to block the onset of puberty even before they transition to the opposite gender as teens. At…
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…en his question and the condescending, irrelevant answers he received from Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, inspired RD to reach out to Hassan. To get him to tell his side of the story. “Upon entering,” Hassan told us, CNN let him know he’d have the chance to ask his “very important question in front of the entire world.” With a nervous quiver in his voice, Hassan went for it (video below): How would a Republican administration help bring peace to P…
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…ting Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs, swept the election and formed the new seven-member presidency. The dream of Bosnia as a multicultural, multiethnic model of tolerance and coexistence for the rest of Yugoslavia—and Europe—had started to unravel. On June 25, 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia. A brief military intervention in Slovenia and a full-scale war in Croatia quickly unfolded. The military campaign was in…
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…t hope that the act of encounter with someone who is unfamiliar will bring new ways of thinking to light. After all, support for marriage equality more than doubles among people who know a gay person. The Pew Research Center reports that of the 14% of Americans who went from opposing to supporting gay marriage in the last decade, 37% (the largest category) did so because of “friends/family/acquaintances who are gay/lesbian.” The second largest cat…
Read More…to become better organized as a political force, even as they increase in number. The major impediment to that kind of organization is the fact that it is very difficult for secularists to conceive of themselves in tribal terms. Most tribes, whether of nations or ethnicities or sports fandom, can easily demarcate their membership—it’s the people who look like us, or talk like us, or dress like us. Tribes organized around religious belief have rit…
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…now that they need to have more children, because their death rates are outnumbering their births rates, and they’re in crisis,” Michelle Duggar told Christian news network CBN last week. “My Body is Not My Own” It’s not only on the campaign trail that the Quiverfull playbook is enjoying a wider audience. Amid all the discussion in recent months about the new fight over contraception—a development that seemed to take much of the mainstream media…
Read More…have the greatest concentration of white supremacists in America), I met a number of Christian pastors and activists. Afterwards, a conservative evangelical told me he felt that Islamophobia and Christophobia were similar (I guess it’s better than denying bigotry exists at all). I also received an e-mail from a participant in the event who came by because of RD: Dear Haroon, Thanks for your talk at WSU tonight and [for] your perspective on things….
Read More…’s Jewishness seems like a weird way to do that. I do, however, like their new video (though I worry about some of its implications): As a strong answer to a question I recently posed in The Forward – why should American Jews care about social justice? – the clip succinctly highlights a century of Jewish social justice concern. It’s compelling viewing. At the same time, both the clip and Bend The Arc’s new website situate this narrative in a Jewis…
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…urprise. In October 2005—just three years after the bishops’ adopted their new norms—the Archdiocese of Chicago’s review board recommended removing an accused priest, Daniel McCormack, from ministry, and Cardinal Francis George refused to do so. He wasn’t removed from ministry until January 2006, and McCormack later pled guilty to abusing five kids. As the victims’ attorney Marc Pearlman told NPR, “I just don’t know… how many kids were abused betw…
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