Religion Dispatches
…ington Post, pollsters Robert P. Jones and Daniel Cox of Public Religion Research write: Faced with significant Democratic defeats, however, some activists who advise Democrats on religious outreach are succumbing to the temptation to claim that the GOP victories are entirely attributable to a lack of faith organizing by Democrats. Take for example, the arguments made by Eric Sapp, founding partner of the Eleison Group, who the RNS article notes w…
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…that her abortion was inspired by her belief that “if it is not the right time or the right circumstance to have a baby, a pregnant person has the inherent spiritual authority not to call that particular future into being. Religious freedom law protects religious practices regardless of whether they’re mandatory in any religious tradition or derive from formal religious doctrine. After all, no religious text prohibits adherents from providing con…
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…Christianity to get a feeling for the way this debate takes place in real time. And beyond the sorts of theological, political, and institutional differences among Christians of various stripes is the simple but complicating fact of globalilzation. Christianity is unquestionably the dominant religious presence in America, though the contours and composition of this tradition in the United States have been and are currently shaped by patterns of…
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…d became readily available to the masses. The 1960s proved to be the ideal time for the global dissemination of yoga, since it witnessed the British-American counterculture and the lifting of immigration restrictions to much of Western Europe and the United States, resulting in an influx of Indian gurus ready and eager to deliver yoga to a counterculture grasping for something radically opposed to what they perceived as the puritanical, body-nega…
Read More…anasia), vocations and ongoing formation (shoring up the rapidly declining number of priests and nuns) and, of course, religious freedom (Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who arranged Kim Davis’ meeting with Pope Francis, received two standing ovations from the bishops.). Then the debate turned to the USCCB’s quadrennial “Faithful Citizenship” voting guide. The bishops had voted earlier to revise the 2007 edition prepared for the 2008 election, whic…
Read More…pective lesbian mothers was even more unrealistic than it is today.” The researcher for the new study, Mark Regnerus, isn’t free from his own bias, however. As Freedom to Marry points out in a press release on the study, Regnerus, ”is well known for his ultra-conservative ideology and the paper was funded by the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation – two groups commonly known for their support of conservative causes. The Witherspoon I…
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…t even the strictest of religious traditions have a tendency to shift with time, and as our culture changes. Like Niedzielski’s friends, people who claim intense faith and adherence to a certain doctrine may likely reconsider those beliefs as technology advances and its use becomes accepted in everyday life, Campbell said. Even if official church policies don’t change, churchgoers often do. The Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception hasn’t…
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…nuclear bomb spreads across the whole world, against the gay movement.” Researcher Kopya Koama, who narrates much of God Loves Uganda, authored Politicial Research Associates’ 2012 report, “Colonizing African Values: How the U.S. Christian Right is Transforming Politics in Africa,” which among other things examines the African activities of the American Center for Law and Justice, the legal organization established by Pat Robertson and run by Jay…
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…uard. However, I never once had even a vague sense of danger during this research. There is a trope in American horror of the dedicated researcher who uncovers too much. The power of this trope played out in 1996, when a reporter in New York vanished while doing a story on the vampire community. As I describe in the book, she was almost certainly killed by the Russian mafia. There is a certain romance in imagining that she was taken by vampires, b…
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…igher than the so-called external form of religion… That is why in ancient times, the greatest prophets were great musicians.” Members of the Grateful Dead in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury neighborhood in 1966. Photo by Herb Greene from the Grateful Dead Archive at UCSC. Used with the gracious permission of the photographer. The members of the Grateful Dead did not set out to be religious figures and they certainly do not view themselves that way…
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