Religion Dispatches
…the jury selection process (prosecutors regularly move to exclude African American jurors). And as legal scholar Michelle Alexander shows in The New Jim Crow, it even affects the way prosecutors assign blame to defendants. Alexander writes of the disproportionate number of incarcerated black and brown youth: “A major reason for these disparities is unconscious and conscious racial biases infecting decision making. In the state of Washington, for…
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…ol, to be shut out in the dark, to drift, to face the abyss with no armor. Flight is an utterly human response to mystery. But sometimes the need for control, absolutes, and knowledge careens out of control. To wit: Those who desire to have creationism taught in our nation’s public schools. They know, because the Bible says so; and what’s more, they know so well that they’re going to take control of the educations not only of their own children, b…
Read More…I to judge?” statement while aboard the papal plane. Since that fateful in-flight press conference, I have been told countless times (often by well-meaning, heterosexual Catholics) that I should find hope and comfort in the pope because he has opened up the doors to mercy for me and my lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer friends. But mercy, it seems to me, is not the door that LGBTQ people need opened to them. Mercy is an act of love, co…
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…pin. The stadium rallies provided tableaux of white, Latino, Asian, Native American, and African American men, singing, holding hands, and praying together in a show of Christian male bonding. True, Promise Keepers provided no theological or political critique of structural racism in the United States—racism was deemed a personal sin to be confessed. These attitudes about race found their iconic moment at the 1997 DC rally. When white evangelist J…
Read More…nd power of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Paprocki said. “Be uprooted and put to flight from the Church of God from souls created in the image of God and redeemed by the precious blood of the divine lamb. “Dare no more, oh cunning serpent, to deceive the human race, to persecute the church of God, to shake the chosen of God and sift them like wheat,” he continued. In an unusual use of public services, the exorcism included two armed Springfield police o…
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…an government threatened to take retaliatory measures limiting the stay of American visitors. After all this time, having their marriage broken up by governments became a real possibility. By Monday, the administration had backed off a bit, lifting the outright ban on green card holders from the affected nations. This still would have required the husband to undergo the “extreme vetting.” Since there is no American embassy in Iran, that would in t…
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…ve pundit David Frum acknowledged would effectively ban abortion for large numbers of women), a look at the experience of military women who are already living under the burden of similar prohibitions could be timely and politicizing, as well as a reminder of how much ground has been ceded already. Going forward, the failure in care that military women have long had to contend with could be shared by all American women. Kolbi-Molinas says: When yo…
Read More…ile, I think, an island-colony. We can reach it by a thirty-minute charter flight from Miami, yet never reach it at all.” Today, Cuba is more in our reach. As a Cuban-American from Miami I have been raised amidst the existential crisis of the Cuban exile community, a community with a rabid anger towards the Castro regime and simultaneous love and compassion for their fellow Cubans on the island. I, like many children of exiles, was raised holding…
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…life in jail.” The theme of alienation is expressed in the song’s focus on flight—from the law, from society, even from friends. And yet we are drawn to identification with an outlaw so alienated from the rest of the world, he believes the Devil is his only friend. In my ministry as an Anglican deacon, leading ministries that offer food, clothing and, most important of all, fellowship to homeless folks living on the streets of Vancouver’s West Sid…
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…m, the question of the day was similar to ones being asked today: Can this flight from the churches be stopped? Chubb feared that these wayfarers on the frontier would “become individualists and isolationists so far as religion is concerned, each ‘going it alone.’” Chubb’s words, so similar to Robert Putnam’s “bowling alone,” resonate clearly today, and they offer a warning to those who bemoan what such high numbers of “nones” means for the future…
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