Religion Dispatches
…year, a tweeted quote from comedian John Fugelsang made its way from the Huffington Post to the social media feeds of progressive Christians of my ilk: But Fugelsang’s spin on the “Jesus was a Liberal” bumper sticker likewise appeared on the feeds of many atheists, agnostics, humanists, and sundry other Nones (people who do not claim an institutional religious affiliation) of my virtual acquaintance. Many of these were participants in my study of…
Read More…boards, Dungeons & Dragons, and other deviant media are themselves a form of folklore. Ironically, our horror and fascination over these crimes makes Slender Man even more fascinating and fuels the legend complex further. Somewhat like the Greek myth of Cronus, Americans have a deep-seated fear that their children will overthrow them. During the Red Scare, it was the communists who could reportedly persuade impressionable youth to kill their pare…
Read More…sed on censorship rather than the content of the book itself. The Doniger affair is actually the latest salvo in a longstanding battle within India—mostly intellectual but sometimes violent—over the definition of the secular state (and where religion fits into this concept). Censorship —or the threat of it—has become a powerful symbol in this battle. It’s too simplistic to say that it’s a Left-Right conflict, although the Indian elections helped t…
Read More…pregnant, and also have lower abortion rates when compared to their more affluent counterparts.” Brookings’ Isabel Sawhill has suggested that increasing poor women’s access to expensive, but highly effective long-term methods of contraception, like the IUD, could be a game-changer in preventing unintended pregnancy and breaking the cycle of poverty: [T]he most realistic approach to slowing the growth of single-parent families is to help women del…
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…orically, a woman watching a men’s sporting event was presumed to have a different relationship to what she was seeing than the man sitting next to her. She wasn’t supposed to see herself in Roger Federer, Herschel Walker, or Geoff Hurst (the only man to score a hat trick in a World Cup Final). Conversely, men haven’t been trained to have those dreams about women. I mean, we’re supposed to dream of women’s bodies, but not like that. What could we…
Read More…et’s send America back to Civics class! Citizens need a refresher on the differences in meaning between a “legal person” and a flesh-and-blood one. And we need to do a better job of it than Mitt Romney did when he said, “corporations are people, my friend.” They’re not, in fact, although they are “legal persons.” But not all “persons” are the same. Some are sheer legal fictions, for instance, such as corporations, universities, and trusts. Another…
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…ericans into the movement and anchoring them there—and that made it more difficult for people to leave the movement when all the abuse, harassment, and terrorism was occurring. Despite the fact that the majority of the People’s Temple membership was black, Jim Jones chose mostly white women for leadership roles. Why did this happen? Had there been prominent African-Americans who exercised real power in the church, then there would have been a lot…
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…tended last weekend’s conference on global LGBT activism in New York. At Huffington Post, the Williams Institute’s Andrew Park discusses a shift in LGBT advocacy strategy at the U.N. to focus more on economic development. Zachary Quinto narrates a new video on the cost of anti-LGBT discrimination for the United Nations Free & Equal campaign The European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency this week released an EU-wide legal analysis of protections a…
Read More…rsion of The King of Kings was mocked incessantly for the boyish-looking Jeffrey Hunter as Christ who, despite being in his 30s, looked so young that the film was dubbed, “I was a teenage Jesus.” Decades before that, some critics were scandalized in 1927 when King of Kings featured a Jesus with short, closely cropped hair. Obsessions with the bodies of the Bible characters, however, have obscured the stories of the stones, wood and other material…
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…countries. In fact, the rapid increase in the proportion of religiously unaffiliated Americans at the expense of Christianity—a trend that has generated significant buzz in recent years—can be traced back only to the 1990s. Since then, however, the shift has been stunning. I’ll put my cards on the table here: I consider that a good thing, given that frequent church attendance consistently correlates with voting Republican, especially among White A…
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