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…
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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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…o include a generous, Federalist Society-shaped loophole. According to the code: Except in unusual circumstances, no such appearance will be created when a Justice speaks to a group of students or any other group associated with an educational institution, a bar group, a religious group, or a non-partisan scholarly or cultural group. As Jay Willis points out: The challenge is that the six conservatives have a favorite “non-partisan scholarly or cu…
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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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…te on his blog 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…
Read More…t in an essay entitled “The makeup of Synod of Bishops on the family is disappointing.” Reese is disappointed that so many Curia officials will be participating, and he notes that they should be “staff, not policymakers.” He explained: “They have all the other weeks of the year to advise the pope. This is the time for bishops from outside of Rome to make their views known.” Reese observes that the choices of who will be advising the bishops also s…
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…to get his joke about Jews and Chinese food. But Chernoff received rousing applause when he declared, “God is moving among our people” and “Yeshua is the only way.” Coach Mac appeared on stage to speak about what sparked his interest in Jewish-Christian reconciliation, and to introduce material from his new book, Two Minute Warning, where McCartney calls reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles “the biblical pathway to worldwide revival.” In a dra…
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…ill host the World Congress of Families summit in May. Netherlands: Mobile app designed to help LGBT migrants & refugees Dutch officials have created a mobile app to help LGBT migrants get information on refugee rights and resources and Dutch asylum procedures. Liberia: Essay on ‘tacit tolerance’ and backlash to public pressure for LGBT equality Baba Sillah, a Liberian post-graduate student in the Graduate School of Global Studies at Sophia Univer…
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…ce generally, the interactive reshaping of spiritual life mobile computing applications—apps—are taking up the creative slack in inviting believers, seekers, and non-believers of all stripes into what Meyers refers to as the “adventurous and always unpredictable exploration of God’s strange and surprising ways with the world.” Scholars and religion journalists are just beginning to address the impact of religious apps on the shaping of formal and…
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…e New York Review of Books, advocates age restrictions or flat-out bans on app use. Both of these approaches presume a fundamental weakness in human agency. State intervention is the only way, these writers argue, to protect us against ourselves. Well, sort of. These kinds of provisions don’t protect agency so much as they determine an acceptable degree to which it will be lost. They don’t address the deeper social forces and habits of mind that e…
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