Religion Dispatches
…stribution of wealth are not in the gospel. It’s simply not true. Luke 1:52-53 describes Jesus’ mother, Mary, anticipating his birth with these words: “He [God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” This same Jesus tells us in Matthew 19:24 that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to e…
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…ainst the scourge of trafficking. But Giglio refused to back away from a 15-year-old sermon that could only be seen as an “old” evangelical invective. Who was the victim here? The gays who Giglio’s listeners believed were sinners? His defenders say it was Giglio himself. One of his friends, the “new” evangelical Gabe Lyons (whose book Pally highlights in her essay) called the implicit pressure on Giglio to withdraw from the inaugural a “hate crime…
Read More…activist from Phoenix, Arizona. As Cristian grew too weak to continue his fast in public, Sam Adair, a self-described “active” Mormon, father of three and immigration attorney from Austin, Texas, traveled to stand on the mall. RD: How did you come to be fasting for immigration reform on the national mall in Washington, D.C.? SA: My concern about immigration reform started when was 14 or 15 years old and had a job picking watermelons on a farm ou…
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…tations in the article. Finally, I wish to assure the reader that I do not write this essay out of malice or spite, but a sense of profound duty to the call of Christianity to serve the poor, and because I believe fully in the responsibility of historians to know the full picture of whom they write, praise, and utilize in modern thought. I was introduced to the French Jesuit by one of his most reverent followers and one of my dear friends, Fr. Tho…
Read More…tations in the article. Finally, I wish to assure the reader that I do not write this essay out of malice or spite, but a sense of profound duty to the call of Christianity to serve the poor, and because I believe fully in the responsibility of historians to know the full picture of whom they write, praise, and utilize in modern thought. I was introduced to the French Jesuit by one of his most reverent followers and one of my dear friends, Fr. Tho…
Read More…about whether such an arrangement would satisfy his clients, but he was non-committal. (Religious non-profits have also brought RFRA claims against the accommodation.) The argument wasn’t over, though, without a kosher butcher analogy. This one was raised by Justice Samuel Alito, who pointed to a Danish effort that would close kosher and halal slaugherhouses through a law that would ban killing an animal without stunning it first. Verrilli describ…
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…native title would you give the book? I love the title of my book. It’s my best title yet, I think. I write in the preface about my hesitation to figure my relationship with God as a love relationship. It seemed simultaneously so medieval-mystic, so patriarchal, so oedipal that it made me cringe. Calling it a break-up also meant I had to come out: I had to admit to myself and to the rest of the world that the God I’d been dating was a man. I’m a f…
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…editor! Otherwise I would just be like, “Isn’t the literary power of a well-crafted essay the main thing people are looking for in a book?”) Chrissy: Heh, we needed each other! I have a Ph.D. in history and have been learning to write in non-academic genres over the last five years or so, but if I’d done this book without Lauren, I’d have gotten bogged down in statistics, context, and the academic-ish apparatus. Lauren helped me considerably in cr…
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…doing papers, and Masters degree students writing thesis, or Ph.D. scholars-in-the-making writing dissertations about Islam from the perspective of sexuality and gender identity issues. I find it amazing that they read my book and gain a sense of empowerment to do their own work. That is what we call, in the Islamic tradition, a sadaqa jariya, a gift that keeps giving benefit even after the giver has passed away. I hope my book is a sadaqa jariya….
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…the United States the vast majority of our medical resources go towards end-of-life care, using medicine, the law, philosophy, ethics, and religion as lenses through which she helps her reader understand difficult questions about what death is, how death should happen, and how death shouldn’t. The Good Death has as a central sentiment that “Because of medical developments, we’ve gotten away from caring for our dying, from seeing death up close… [s…
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