Religion Dispatches
…eap goods are cheaply made. I am not speaking of quality, I am speaking of cheap labor. We must recognize that through the act of shopping, whether it is for an article of clothing, a toy, a pint of strawberries, or even our morning cup of coffee, we participate in a global economy that values profit over people. Disposable goods are made by disposable people, faceless individuals whose backbreaking and unjustly paid labor produce the goods we con…
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…ot an aggregate rating of 2 percent on Rotten Tomatoes—the studio started claiming secular bias and promoting fan reviews. Many evangelicals view cultural elites as condescending and hostile to begin with, so negative reviews met certain expectations. Even as fans of Left Behind talked about how great it was, however, the old divisions were apparent. There were those who talked about how the film is a great evangelizing opportunity. One woman repo…
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…nd give him this book, to surprise him, too—in a good way. (I would accept Lakers tickets in lieu of apologies, but I think that particular era is done.) This whole book is a result of a profound evolution, and needs to be seen as such. American Muslims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us out to be (our earliest heroes include Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Malcolm X), but we…
Read More…Unlike Catholic plaintiffs, Hobby Lobby seeks an exemption from covering ella, Plan B, and IUDs, claiming that they may cause an abortion. Scalia declared these methods “not terribly expensive.” But Verilla pointed out that the IUD, one of the most effective methods of birth control, is also one of the most expensive. (They can cost as much as $1,000.) As expected, the Court did not question in any depth the companies’ claim that these methods are…
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…tems adapted for life in small groups. It is psychologically difficult to blame large, abstract entities—like government agencies or corporations—in a meaningful or satisfactory way. Ideologies and conspiracy theories occupy this vacuum, but they offer coherence at the expense of nuance and accuracy. Corporations, prisons, tech giants, school systems, industrialized agriculture, state bureaucracies, insurance companies, and media conglomerates: th…
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…portantly, the relationship between the gang and the church mirrored the relationship between churches and people in favelas. There was mutual respect, which was essential to preserving the peace. Gang members could leave the gang and join the church as long as their participation was deemed genuine. It would be very difficult to fake a conversion in prison because someone’s observing your actions 24 hours a day. For example, if someone converted…
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…a is a believer in that legacy. But the power of sports to produce heightened emotional states of unity, which scholars call “collective effervescence,” can also give it a shared power with religion to occlude injustice in this world, to bury it in cheap, playful sentiment. Sports, like religion, and like the American Dream, will thus continue to be contested symbolic terrain, where the stakes can prove much more complicated than zero-sum games, a…
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…walked to the Tabernacle on Temple Square to wait in the stand-by line for last-minute tickets. Instead they were met by church spokesperson Ruth Todd, who said, “This is no surprise to you, that we won’t be able to offer you a ticket or a place.” Then, as men and boys strode past them into the Tabernacle where they awaited the opportunity to move to the Conference Center where the session would take place, members of Ordain Women lined up indivi…
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…would have to start earlier, and in a sense you could prevent some of the blaming. Or, if violations do happen, you would give people the kind of information that they normally want, and expect each other to use, when they blame and when they’re supposed to blame fairly. Because the research shows that you can blame fairly if you know whether the person did it intentionally, what her alternatives were, what her reasons were; and if the violation w…
Read More…ch status and close down groups for alleged, often minor violations of the law. Last year – setting the stage for the anti-LGBT “propaganda law” – the government introduced criminal charges for “spreading false information.” Kazakhstan’s crackdown on civil society and freedom of expression explicitly condones homophobia. Last October, an Almaty court awarded 34 million tenge (US$187,000) in damages against a Kazakhstani advertising agency for desi…
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