Religion Dispatches
…knack for turning stomachs. Whether they’re brandishing signs at gay pride parades condemning gays and lesbians to hell or protesting the funerals of U.S. soldiers, they seem to be spreading rage and distaste wherever they appear. Now, the WBC folks are on the warpath in Washington State against the big guy himself – Santa Claus. Westboro Baptist Church has jumped into the fray over the atheist sign at Washington’s Capitol building by requesting i…
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…won the John Schlesinger Award at the 2017 Palm Springs International Film Festival in January. The couple was married in January 2015 after months of delays and refusals by local officials to approve a marriage license even thought they had received a federal court order allowing them to marry. The movie is on the festival circuit now. A trailer, in Spanish with English subtitles, is available online; it shows religious protesters opposing the ma…
Read More…onism battles. Over the past several years, recommendations that supplemental materials be introduced in public school science classrooms have been part of anti-evolution bills in states across the country as a way to sneak creationist literature into the curriculum. Because they are not subject to the same formal adoption process as official textbooks, supplemental materials used in local school districts could rely on some seriously dubious sour…
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…they were laughing and never met his startled gaze. I recalled that boy’s alarm when my husband, Phil, and I tried to tell friends that our beliefs had changed. “What beliefs?” “God.” Startled silence. Jaws dropped, eyes wide. “You can’t mean that,” one said. Phil and I were ordained ministers. I had accepted Jesus as my Savior when I was four at the altar of a revival tent in New York’s Catskill Mountains. Growing up in those woods, I talked to…
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…arrival of the touring Seinfeld apartment in Los Angeles just in time for Festivus, the recent proliferation of anti-holiday cards (the Virgin Mary slept around!) and an atheist billboard featuring an anti-church Santa, one could argue Christmas has become a nationwide exercise in tipping over sacred cows. I recently spoke via Skype with S. Brent Rodriguez-Plate, longtime RD contributor, about how the supposedly “blasphemous” has become the every…
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…d columnist for RD) were: Randall Balmer, author, Episcopal priest, and professor of American religious history at Barnard College; Anthea Butler, assistant professor of religion at the University of Rochester; and Diane Winston, the Knight Chair in Media and Religion at USC, who has worked as a reporter for several of the nation’s leading newspapers. Jeff’s book fills a significant gap in both scholarship and media. When it comes to the connectio…
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…ber 15, the National Railroad Museum in Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin, began its “Festival of Trees.” Sixty-six businesses and charitable organizations, including The Satanic Temple of Wisconsin, donated trees to the Museum, which is privately funded and accepts no tax dollars (save for occasional grants). The response was predictable as conservative Christian groups rushed to condemn the five-foot tree adorned with red Christmas lights, upside-down cros…
Read More…children. “I have doubts when it comes to the child’s happiness,” Robert Palazuelos told the paper in March 2015. “I don’t know if the kid will be happier in an orphanage or a gay home.” While the film’s central premise feels outdated, the battle over same-sex couples’ fitness to adopt and raise children is anything but. Mexico’s national patchwork of marriage equality laws leaves many would-be parents in limbo, and LGBT couples in the U.S. don’t…
Read More…lnerable people—including one poor carpenter—in order to fund his lavish lifestyle, and then suggested that Mother Teresa might also ask what Jesus would do. And should Mother Teresa decide that Jesus would want her to use Keating’s donation to restore the money he had defrauded, Mr. Keating offered to put her in touch with those individuals. He never received a reply. Would she be at Occupy? No. One need not be a vehement Mother Teresa detractor…
Read More…r posted an internal email that advised local stores not to promote their halal products during Ramadan. A collection of relics from Pope John Paul II, including a capsule of his blood, will tour Mexico this fall. Rev. Roy Bourgeois has been officially dismissed by his religious order, the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, for his support of women’s ordination. “Don’t tase me bro!” When the head pastor at New Welcome Baptist Church in St. Elmo, Alab…
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