Religion Dispatches
…sed, then, that in comments responding to the The Smoking Gun article, one user called “rahimali” wrote, “I’m ok with a little waterboarding now and again if it shuts the wife’s cakehole. Maybe waterboarding would cure PMS?” Although the torture captured on film at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was presented as aberrant (the behavior of “a few bad apples”), released memos have shown again and again that torture and so-called enhanced interrogatio…
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…ness—common refrains offered up with few palliatives. Back then, God as I knew Him was remote and mediated by the Church—a somber relative of this pastor’s appealingly user-friendly and solution-oriented God. As for the Catholic Mass’s plodding readings and Communion queues, they were an occasion for daydreaming and sinful thoughts—thoughts I agonized in vain to squelch. Which is why I decided, at the age of 16, that I no longer believed unreserve…
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…are needed to imagine the sexual scene he sets. I interviewed creators and users of Christian sexuality websites and asked whether the sexual nature of the content worried them. Surprisingly, no one seemed very concerned. How are they so confident that these websites are wholesome rather than obscene? The Barna Group has its answer, based on the “Porn Phenomenon” data: “Turns out, it’s more a question of function than form. If it’s used for sexual…
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…helps designers use a system of digital triggers and reward loops to hook users, keeping them engaged. It’s a guide to making zombies, not to curing them. There has been backlash to Eyal’s book, mostly focused on consumer protection policies. In Aeon, Cubit co-producer Michael Schulson argues for government regulation of addictive technologies. Slate magazine founder Jacob Weisberg, writing in the New York Review of Books, advocates age restricti…
Read More…d: New Constitution to Recognize Third Gender Naith Payton reports at Pink News that Thailand’s new constitution will include references to a third gender: A spokesman for the panel which is drafting the new constitution, Kamnoon Sittisamarn, said this was to ensure all sexual identities would be protected and treated equally under the law. He told Reuters: “We are putting the words ‘third gender’ in the constitution because Thai society has advan…
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…orts from coast to coast. The recent contretemps around the opening of the new REBAR in the old G Lounge space in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood is (again) quite typical. Evidently aware that G had finally, after many years, become a rare welcoming downtown space for people of color, the new management made a point of making REBAR distinctly unwelcoming to African American patrons. With Pride month upon us, I want to call out what should be recog…
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…a chaotic system. For businesses tied to the weather-closing status of the New York City Public Schools, there’s yet another ethical element. During one of New York’s worst storms—last year—Mayor de Blasio kept the schools open in horrendous travel conditions. One of the reasons given? Many children get their only hot meal of the day at school. We have to force kids to school so they can eat a square meal? And Zuccotti Park was cleared out years a…
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…sts as newsworthy. In 1981, when physician Lawrence Mass wrote a story for New York Native, a small gay newspaper, the disease did not even have a name. Several weeks later, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported an outbreak of a rare cancer among a handful of gay men in Los Angeles. Soon after, mainstream news outlets briefly reported the findings but despite its rapid spread, the cancer, which would be identified as AIDS, did not receive…
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…l of a portrait of Reinhold Niebuhr, 1948, by Ernest Hamlin Baker, Gouache on board, from the National Portrait Gallery. Photo is by flickr user cliff1066, used under a Creative Commons license….
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…e of Peace….
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