Religion Dispatches
…at weird was, in fact, code for Mormon, and that Obama and team planned to use the word “weird” as a dog-whistle to stoke voters’ antipathies towards Mormonism in 2012. The news set off a wave of cringes among Mormon politicos as well. Because Mormons do recognize “weird” as a word that sticks to us in the American imagination. In 1995, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley declared in an interview with Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes, “We are not a…
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…ten by and for first-century Christians, a people under siege, the authors used allegory and coded language to convey a message of hope to believers and to protect authors from certain death at the hands of their oppressors. The author of Revelations suggests readers may not understand the severe trials and tribulations of their time, but reminds them that Jesus teaches in Christ all is well. Where Revelations was, “once seen as encouragement to h…
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…Christian society and a form of religious politics that will make biblical code the law of the United States. These activists are quite serious about bringing Christian politics into power. Bray said that it is possible, under the right conditions, for a Christian revolution to sweep across the United States and bring in its wake Constitutional changes that would allow for biblical law to be the basis of social legislation. Failing that, Bray envi…
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…ons but, like the Bush Administration before it, the administration has refused because of Mugabe’s ongoing human rights abuses, including controlling the country’s diamond wealth by military force and violence, and repression of political opposition and free press. Legalizing Homosexuality Could “Bring a Curse” The EFZ/ACLJ pamphlet also calls for constitutional prohibitions on both abortion, by defining life as “beginning at conception,” and on…
Read More…twist themselves into knots to avoid admitting that the same argument was used to oppose interracial marriages—which it definitely was. Of course, modern “religious freedom” has been interpreted so broadly that it now covers all manner of sins. Are you a business owner who doesn’t want to employ trans people? Just say your faith doesn’t allow you to recognize your trans female employee as a woman, which means she’s violating the dress code when s…
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…areness of the value of condoms in HIV prevention on the basis that condom use promotes promiscuity. There is some worry that the horrific wave of extrajudicial killings being carried out by government and vigilantes in the name of fighting drug trafficking could be turned against others, including LGBT people. Malta: Ban on conversion therapy adopted along with law ‘depathologizing’ gender identity Two pieces of legislation were adopted on Decemb…
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…Spirit guided his pronouncements. “The Church cannot change her answer because this answer is true because the Catholic Church, instituted by Christ could not have so wrongly erred during all those centuries of its history,” they wrote. As one of the conservative theologians famously asked one of the female members of the commission, what would happen to “the millions we have sent to hell” for using contraception if the teaching were suddenly chan…
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…60s and early ‘70s counterculture. The federal government criminalized the use, possession, sale, and cultivation of these drugs, though many continued to use them both recreationally and sacramentally. To honor the latter, Ruck created the word entheogen by combining the Greek word “entheos,” often translated as “god within,” with “gen” from the word hallucinogen. The term has grown in recent decades motivated by several factors. Chief among them…
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…e uneven evolution of our thinking about these things, and the language we use to describe them, casts fresh light on how we use other shorthand terms in this complex and fraught dimension of public life. The term “faith-based,” for example, we use more or less synonymously with “religious” and as substitutes for such terms as “ecumenical” and “interfaith.” It has become a warm and fuzzy term used for glossing over religious differences, both for…
Read More…vokes a question. Meanwhile, why is there no question when I use ‘He’? Because I use that too. I intentionally use all three pronouns available in English; Arabic has just two. This was easiest of all to explain to Indonesians, because bahasa has only one pronoun. It is clear to me that a pronoun is only a function of language. It does not convey or express gender politics. The trouble is, of course, when we choose one pronoun of the English three…
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