Religion Dispatches
…reating serious backlash among BYU students and faculty. Since then, Honor Code enforcement has been conducted through referrals—even third party referrals—of suspect students to a campus Honor Code office, a system of enforcement that has created significant opportunities for abuse. (When I was a BYU student, it was possible to make an anonymous third-party referral.) Honor Code enforcement on campus has been used to bait and target gays and libe…
Read More…s to his monthly “Ultimate Wealth Report”—one year, along with a bunch of “bonus reports” about capital gains and currency trading and the like—for $47. (Here I can’t resist pointing out that “bonus” is just a letter away from “bogus.”) It’s hard to know if Hyman has actually had any success as an investor. In the video, he makes a lot of his one big win, when, late last year, he predicted that Best Buy would jump from $11 a share to $40. Currentl…
Read More…to act as if he did not believe. Yet his understanding of the relationship between belief and practice suggests something about how we have come to think of religion in the marketplace approach of contemporary spirituality. Bell treats atheism as a religious practice in which one attends services and reads devotional literature, the “sacred texts” of atheism, as he calls them. The conclusion he hopes for is just what Pascal thought was impossible,…
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…nt, and a pledge at the end. A final admonition declares that breaking the Code will result in immediate execution. The Code is illustrated with images pulled from a website promoting the 2007 Swedish film Arn: The Knights Templar. This past spring, copies of the Code were mysteriously distributed across Michoacan. Like La Familia, members of the Knights Templar must refrain from drugs and must commit to routine drug testing, but unlike La Famila…
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…se FedSoc publicly casts itself as a non-partisan debate club, though, the code effectively protects Neil Gorsuch’s sacred right to don a bow tie next time FedSoc conclave rolls around. This ethics code exists largely as a marketing tool for reporters willing to buy what the FedSoc Six are selling, but also as cover for the justices’ clear preferences. Its language, which allows justices to participate in “a nonprofit civic, charitable, educationa…
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…llywood Censored. The code they designed became the Motion Picture Conduct Code, popularly know as the Hays Code after it was adopted by William Hays, a Presbyterian elder who was hired by the major studios to help clean up the industry’s image after it was rocked by a series of scandals. The code, says Black, “was a fascinating combination of Catholic theology, conservative politics and pop psychology—an amalgam that would control the content of…
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…nces’ and ‘further impair(s) our communion and create(s) a deeper mistrust between us. “‘This results in significant distance between us and places huge strains on the functioning of the Instruments of Communion and the ways in which we express our historic and ongoing relationships.’ Tanzania: Government crackdown on LGBT activists and their supporters spreads fear The Globe and Mail talked to LGBT activists about the widespread fear being felt s…
Read More…(their) vigilance against those groups.” Homosexuality is criminalized in Tanzania, and sex among men is punishable by jail terms ranging from 30 years to life imprisonment. Tanzanian authorities recently have cracked down on homosexuals. In September 2016, the government temporarily suspended HIV/AIDS outreach projects targeting gay men. Romania: Legislators Move Toward Referendum on Marriage Ban Promoted by Orthodox Church Legislators reportedl…
Read More…em the right? Africa: Report appraises HIV interventions for MSM in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine issued a report in May mapping and appraising HIV prevention and care interventions for men who have sex with men in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, countries in which homosexual conduct is illegal. The appraisal was commissioned by the Sexual Health and Rights Program, which is coordin…
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…og that he felt that Custer or Columbus would have been a more appropriate code name for bin Laden, and that the use of Geronimo was just another example of how “We’ve been reduced to caricatures as mascots and entertainment in sports and media.” In fact, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee held hearings recently on American Indians and racist stereotypes, and one of the first items of business was a discussion of why this particular code name wa…
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