Religion Dispatches
…’s Clinic. “40 Days for Prayer,” by comparison, doesn’t necessarily follow the Lenten calendar. At the Six Rivers Planned Parenthood in Humbolt County, California, today is Day 36. “Today we pray for the families we’ve chosen. May they know the blessing of choice.”…
Read More
…s of a shared faith—almost certainly could not be reproduced today. Nor could the conditions responsible for creating the Wisconsin Idea. Looking at the history, that lesson seems obvious. What was radical yesterday isn’t often radical still today, and what’s radical today doesn’t very often stay that way for long. 1. This is contested, with other towns claiming to be the birthplace of the Republican party. Ripon has it documented. 2. The family s…
Read More
…ual physical war, but a Cold War. How did Hoover connect with Christianity Today? Christianity Today is a new magazine in the fifties. It’s just starting out. And they’re trying to connect with prominent individuals that they believe will help to bolster this new thing they’re calling “neo-evangelicalism” or “modern evangelicalism.” And they reach out to Hoover and ask him to be one of their contributors to the magazine. And Hoover does that. Hoov…
Read More
…ympathetic to the advertising. But we don’t take a position on this except promoting dialogue. At Sojourners, we’ve decided to have a safe place for dialogue and even disagreement on our staff and in our constituency. That’s interesting, since the Believe Out Loud ad could be best interpreted as . . . promoting dialogue. Sojourners, so far, has been silent on the Rev. Robert Chase’s piece we published here. In the court of public opinion Twitter,…
Read More…ing anti-Catholic and anti-Hispanic sentiments in America. But speakers at today’s press conference suggested the church has better options. “Surely Archbishop Oscar Romero is a more worthy candidate for the Hispanic peoples of the Americas,” said Norma Louise Flores, author of a MoveOn.org petition opposing the canonization. Steven Newcomb, co-founder and co-director of the Indigenous Law Institute and author of Pagans in the Promised Land: Decod…
Read More
…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
…a veto power over the civil rights and civil liberties of others. However, today, as in the past, religion is being used as both a weapon and a shield by those seeking to deny others equality.” Indeed, if we are discussing the abstract concept of religious liberty — the kind guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — it’s hard to justify scare quotes. Even the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) came into being throu…
Read More
…nality.’” Of course, Richard Dawkins himself wasn’t sitting around writing code and coming up with reasonably civil responses to hypothetical religious proclamations for Atheos (although some less famous but equally antagonistic thinkers like David Silverman did contribute to the app’s content). And for many atheists, even those not prone to Dawkins’ venomous outbursts against religious people, his name lends the app credibility. He remains a figu…
Read More
…Liberal Western values may be on the declineelsewhere in Europe. But Malta today is proving that a country can adhere to key traditional values, promote its own religious heritage, and recognize the dignity of every citizen—all at the same time. Suriname: Country makes progress at home but votes against LGBT human rights at UN Human Rights Watch LGBT Program Advocacy Director Boris Dittrich writes: Suriname’s government is on the right track at ho…
Read More…atened gay Congressman Claudio Arriagada Macaya. Ireland: Interfaith group promotes marriage equality, Catholic bishop warns against As Ireland heads toward a May referendum on marriage equality, an interfaith coalition, Faith in Marriage Equality, has been formed to urge support. Richard O’Leary said the group was created to let people of faith know that they can vote yes, adding that media attention has focused on conservative Christian groups a…
Read More