Religion Dispatches
…ed the code of conduct for comments on National Catholic Reporter. His post is a primer on violating NCR’s own rules for respectful conversation. Maybe someone at NCR can give him a much-needed tutorial. NCR Comment code: Be respectful. Do not attack the writer. Take on the idea, not the messenger. Use appropriate language. Avoid vulgarities and slurs. Keep to the point. Deliberate digressions don’t aid the discussion….
Read More…to, consensual homosexual activity. He threatened to have Fry arrested for promoting homosexuality. Business Week reported last week, “Uganda’s shilling fell the most since March 2012 against the dollar after donors started cutting aid after President Yoweri Museveni signed a law that imposes life sentences on some homosexual acts.” Cameroon: Church Contributes to Brutal Climate for LGBT People Andy Kopsa reports in The Nation that Cameroon has es…
Read More…arly presidential primary states (South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Iowa) promoting a creationist film called The Genesis Code, and holding fundraising receptions. The moralistic film follows an unbelieving hockey player and a Christian journalism student who struggle with “reconciling their scientific studies and what’s taught in the Bible” as he falls for her and she uses their relationship to “guide” him “toward God.” You can read a “pro-famil…
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…vangelical anymore.” Prothero’s assessment is noteworthy for its intuitive appeal. The idea of “politicized religion” is everywhere in both journalistic and academic discussion of everything from evangelical Trump supporters to Islamic extremism and beyond. But is this common understanding of the relation of religion and politics truly useful? In critiquing the “politicizing” of evangelical Christianity, for example, Prothero implies that evangeli…
Read More…e cis-het patriarchy and want the world to receive it as a universal moral code. They would be just as happy if you didn’t notice that they can only provide one particular interpretation of the gospel, rather than an objective and unchanging truth. To boot, it’s an interpretation that isn’t even fully shared by other conservative religious groups, nor is it without controversy even within the Southern Baptist Convention. Take, for example, the que…
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…folk mass, but by the end of eighth grade—1972—posters of fetuses began to appear on the street outside the church as the 9:00 mass let out, and the new pastor, an old Irish-American guy, was harping on communism and the menace of “Red China” on a weekly basis. I stopped going to mass regularly in the spring of 1972. About thirty years later, personal crisis and desperation led me to search for a church. I had expected, at the beginning of this se…
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…l Hameed says that moral police targeted one of the accused using a dating application, reportedly entrapping the individual by posing as someone interested in a relationship. Through the application’s messaging feature, they acquired the accused’s address and then were granted permission by the public prosecutor to raid the apartment. When the moral police conducted the raid, they found eight men present at the residence, all of whom would eventu…
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…diverse. Maybe these explorers did see people whom a modern American would code as white. Maybe not. As Robinson demonstrates in The Lost White Tribe, the better questions here have to do with the interpretation of bodies, not just with the bodies themselves. Basically: why were European and American adventurers so eager to find these far-flung white tribes in the first place? And they were eager. Reports of white Indians and white Africans made h…
Read More…oters might throw their support behind Donald Trump and upset their neocon apple cart. In “An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics” published in the National Review, “natural rights” proponent Robert P. George and Pope John Paul II biographer George Weigel lament that the Republican Party, which has been a flawed but “serviceable” vehicle for “promoting causes at the center of Catholic social concern in the United States,” is about to be hijacked by one…
Read More…hat support LGBT equality: “I hear some people who received dirty money to promote homosexuality in our Christian country are currently seeking to be re-elected. I hear one of them is seeking for a higher office. Elect only those that promote good Christians values because voting people tainted with such dirty money may bring a curse on our country,” Archbishop Ntagali said. Matthew Davies at the Episcopal News Service writes that Michael Curry, p…
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