Religion Dispatches
…this is aside from Trump’s own tweets on the subject: Horrific incident in FL. Praying for all the victims & their families. When will this stop? When will we get tough, smart & vigilant? Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart! What has happened in Orlando is just the beginning. Our leadership is weak and ineffective. I called it and asked for the…
Read More
…he American-born man who massacred dozens of people at a gay night club in Orlando, Florida, reportedly called 911 just before the attack and pledged allegiance to ISIS. CNN reported that the gunman had been interviewed by the FBI in 2013 and 2014 “but was not found to be a threat.” MSNBC reported that the shooter’s father said he had been upset by seeing two men kissing in public. ISIS later claimed responsibility through its news agency, Amaq. A…
Read More
…senior citizen and take his middle. I have watched passengers with first class seats hand their tickets to uniformed veterans and sit in economy. Several times I have witnessed people move further back to allow a mother to sit next to her children. All of these required not only the hassle of moving, but also the discomfort of a worse seat. Sometimes the person with the better seat was asked, sometimes s/he offered. In most situations, the person…
Read More
…ts commitment to morally distinctive notions of “human dignity” and “human flourishing,” Catholic natural law—an 800-year-old tradition dating back to Thomas Aquinas—is a lens that offers utter clarity to conservative Catholic jurists, activists, policymakers, and scholars as they observe, describe, and engage the world. The power and sharpness of this lens allow them to confidently snap every human movement—every human desire and motive and act—i…
Read More
…specifically target LGBT folk for hatred. That’s why Qadhi’s attempt to deflect any criticism of his anti-gay theology falls flat. He attacks a straw doll when he says that it’s unfair to have to choose between accepting people’s same-sex relationships or admitting that viewing them as a sin leads “those people” to murder. On the contrary, it’s entirely fair to be asked to stop pathologizing same-sex love on the grounds that this creates, or at l…
Read More
…d has been a welcoming space for LGBT people for years. But as the rainbow flag flapped in the wind above the prayer service, several church members present remarked that such a public statement of solidarity and welcome had never happened before—and wouldn’t have. Something had changed for us at Fourth Presbyterian Church—we realized we needed to own the affirmation we believed in. It’s awful that it took an act of horrific violence to inspire su…
Read More
…is not on them that tender caresses are lavished; far different objects inflame them.” According to historian William G. Clarence-Smith, “Many secular Westerners perceived homosexuality as evidence of primitive survivals or biological decay. Such notions influenced modernizing Muslim reformers, seeking to strengthen their country.” Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab linked what he saw as the decline of the Muslim world to sexuality. To him, the sexual diversity…
Read More
Adam Clayton Powell called it “cheap grace,” but we might call it “cheap atonement”: the effort by sinners to select which sins to acknowledge and repent. Pope Benedict XVI ended his heavily protested visit to England with a heartfelt apology for German bombings of England during the Battle of Britain; though he refused to accept Christian responsibility for the Holocaust, blaming it instead on pagans and atheists. Given that Cardinal Walter Kasp…
Read More
…fter Newtown, after San Bernadino and Orlando. This time the rampage is in Las Vegas, with more dead, more people hospitalized, more deep trauma inflicted, but with the same shitty debate over prayer-vs-action and same despair over the potential for action being recycled. There are some differences, of course. Rather than the NRA paying $3 million to elect a senator from Iowa, we now have a president elected with $30 million NRA dollars, and who p…
Read More
Nighttime shows in Las Vegas feature all sorts of large mammals: lions, tigers, bears, and the rest. So if you had happened to poke your head into The Amazing Meeting, a 1,600-strong skeptic and atheist conference last month, you might be excused for assuming that the giant elephant in the room had escaped from some circus on the Strip. But you’d be wrong. That elephant in the room with us was our own. There’s no pachyderm in Vegas—or on Earth—th…
Read More