Religion Dispatches
…slipped into the dorms we couldn’t get signed into, and posted hundreds of cheap notices printed on 8.5 x 11 paper. We’d invited a prominent imam to speak and ordered a delicious dinner, convinced that the perpetually elastic undergraduate stomach would be the gateway to the soul. The next morning, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were struck, thousands were murdered, New York City went into lockdown, and our community was sent reeling. Eve…
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…nks. You have to determine that on your own.” Haggard’s weekly Oval Office phone calls and grip and grin NAE photo ops with former President George W. Bush are now mere vestiges of an old life, prior to what he calls the “crisis.” At New Life, which Jeff Sharlet described as “not just a battalion of spiritual warriors but a factory for ideas to arm them,” worship services were extravagant multimedia, fog machine-choked productions, in which Haggar…
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…n effect bar their insurers from providing contraceptive coverage as specified under the accommodation designed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a consolidated case challenging the exemption in the spring. The large number of Catholic nonprofits currently using the accommodation and potentially seeking a broader exemption means that potentially thousands of women could lose contraceptive covera…
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…ang Dipertua Agong is Malaysia’s monarch and responsible for defending the sanctity of Islam. He said the screening of such a movie would also be an insult to the Yang Dipertua Agong, who is the head of religion defending the sanctity of Islam in the country. ‘What is their intention, in promoting the movie and wanting to show it,’ Nordin told the Malaysian Insight. ‘It is as if there is an agenda to make homosexuality something acceptable. ‘We ur…
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…arge part of the Great Plains, restored wildlife and built a system of over 800 state and county parks. They electrified an entire region of the country, bringing what had been America’s “Third World” up to 20th century standards. They created works of art, gave concerts, set up theaters throughout the country, ran nursery schools, served over 1.2 billion school lunches to needy children, gave immunizations, taught illiterate adults to read and wr…
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…als and to eventually see them as worthy of ordination and entitled to the sanction of marriage? Did reporting on these believers’ struggles around AIDS predispose other news consumers to rethink their own opinions? What about gays? Did the crisis affect their feelings about “straight” institutions such as religion and marriage, inadvertently fueling a desire to normalize? If so, did coverage of supportive congregations and loving families make a…
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…700 to $800 million in lost tax revenue annually, according to one nonpartisan analysis. Crabb’s conclusion that this exemption violates the Establishment Clause is legally not farfetched. While there’s room to debate whether providing a tax exemption is identical to subsidizing religion directly, it’s hard to avoid reaching the conclusion that an exemption available only to clergy favors religious employees over secular ones. But like “under God”…
Read MoreWhile a number of conservative Christian leaders raise questions about Glenn Beck’s Mormonism, Worldview Matters’ host Brannon Howse continued his attack in a conversation with Kirk Cameron about why Cameron did not participate in Glenn Beck’s Divine Destiny. Howse marveled at the “thick irony” wherein Cameron (the actor who played Buck, the converted journalist warning about the “demonic spirituality of a one world religion” in the Left Behind m…
Read MorePastor Jim Garlow of Skyline Wesleyan Church in San Diego lost his wife of 42 years, Carol, to cancer earlier this month. I grieve for anyone who has lost a loved one, especially a beloved spouse. But it’s too bad Garlow would not be able to extend the same compassion to me if I should lose my beloved spouse of 12 years. You see, Garlow has used the death of his wife as an opportunity to do what he does best: bash gays and lesbians. In an email h…
Read More…ernational Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Comission, in collaboration with a number of partners, released a study on homophobia and transphobia in Caribbean media, based on analysis from Belize, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica and Saint Lucia. The report’s section on Belize refers to the role played by the Belize Association of Evangelical Churches and its vice president, Scott Stirm, who is a U.S. citizen. And from its section on Jamaica: In addition, pol…
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