Religion Dispatches
…presentatives turned away nearly two hundred Mormon women seeking stand-by tickets to a restricted men’s-only session of the faith’s semi-annual global conference. Mormon women travelled from as far away as New York, Florida, and Germany to take part in the collective action organized by the group Ordain Women as a gentle and symbolic demonstration against pervasive gender segregation in LDS Church administration and leadership. All observant men…
Read More…reduced to a kind of majordomo or personal assistant. He fixeth my parking tickets, he secureth me a good table in the restaurant, he leadeth me to book contracts. Even in these minor tasks, the invocation of God seems more of a courtesy than a necessity.” Gone, too, from Osteen’s theology is any mention of topics that might intrude on happy thoughts: Osteen avoids using current events in his messages so he doesn’t get sidetracked in controversy….
Read More…e group did not get a private meeting with Pope Francis, but was given VIP tickets to the pope’s weekly audience in St. Peter’s square. Religion News Service reports that several bishops, including “San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone – point man or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ battle against gay marriage – had written a letter to the Vatican on their behalf.” A group of LGBT Catholics from London who met up with the New Ways…
Read More…undraiser next week for the US Pastors’ Council, which is headed by Welch. Tickets for the event range from $1,000 to $10,000, and Mike Huckabee is also an invited speaker. Taylor’s theme, “A Battle the Nation Is Watching: Is the Rule of Law More Powerful than City Hall?” seems serendipitous for the conservative agitators against the supposedly oppressive state. It’s almost as if the city of Houston wanted to help the Pastors’ Council raise money….
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…n media events. Most major decisions about the composition of presidential tickets — and even policy platforms — are made well before the speaker hits the rostrum. The delegates serve a largely symbolic role, and the speakers’ real audience is the electorate at large, following (or so both political parties hope) convention coverage at home on television and the Internet. Thus, the rhetoric that emerges from presidential nominating conventions sho…
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…Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton in September, received 10 Public Health Act tickets for organizing various anti-public health rallies in northern Alberta last year and revived her Twitter account, dormant since 2016, specifically in order to promote anti-public health events she organized and ran. But the story of Jericho is nothing to worry about. It’s only about divine massacre. Walls come crumbling down They know what they’re doing. One particip…
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…dinals. But on closer inspection, it is clear that women ought not to book tickets to Rome just yet. Juxtaposing “valued” and “clericalized” is odd at best, pernicious at worst. In a church in which ordained male clergy have jurisdiction— that is, authority to make decisions about things that matter—to claim that women who cannot be ordained are valued is a hard case to make. Valued for what and how? We have heard from Francis all about women’s su…
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…16 US cities, drawing sold-out crowds at every stop, with regularly priced tickets ranging between $250 and $500. It is arguably the dominant brand of today’s Republican Party. For good reason, a growing number of expert observers have begun sounding the alarm. I suggest it’s time we hit the panic button. The rally featured plenty of repugnant elements—from the relentless attacks on transgender youth consistent with fascist scapegoating, to the st…
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…with the overwhelming numbers that demonstrate the upward trending of the planet’s mean temperature, or the astonishing images of our melting polar ice caps. The federal deficit? Easily fixed. Our nation’s credit is inexhaustible, and once we reduce the federal government to a more reasonable size, businesses will prosper, and the deficits will disappear. Tax increases? Never. Obviously lowering taxes, especially on the industrial leaders who cre…
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As I age, I have more and more of those eerie moments when I look in the mirror or from above at myself talking and see and hear my dad. But is he really my dad? Recently one of my students said, “I’m adopted, and I’ve come to that point in my life when I want to find out who I really am. So I’ve started to look for my natural parents.” Who are we, really? Our religious and cultural messages say we are defined in large part by who our parents, es…
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