Religion Dispatches
…icilia received the heartbreaking news while attending a conference in the Philippines. He recalls chain-smoking a pack of cigarettes after hearing the report, unsure of his next move. On returning to Mexico, Sicilia laid his son to rest. At the memorial he read a poem: The world is not worthy of words they have been suffocated from the inside as they suffocated you, as they tore apart your lungs… the pain does not leave me all that remains is a w…
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…the myriad positive replies which have come from around the world—from the Philippines and Malta to Argentina and New Zealand. If this were a Vatican trial balloon to gauge support for excluding same-sex loving people, it lost air on liftoff and crashed immediately. There are many casualties, especially young people who are taught such nonsense in Catholic schools. Some African Catholics report that their well-being is in jeopardy because of the s…
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…citizen, and their two teenage sons, both US citizens. Tan fled her native Philippines in 1991, seeking political asylum after her family was victimized by violence stemming from a family dispute over an inheritance; a cousin murdered her sister and mother and shot Tan in the head. Tan and Mercado have been together for 24 years and, she said, welcomed in their Catholic Church where they are active members. “We didn’t feel any kind of rejection in…
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…cribbage in the trenches, and the exotic surprises that Australia and the Philippines held for an Oregon farmboy. Of course, there was a good deal more to his war, but he didn’t care to talk about that. He was a proud veteran who would be buried in a Veteran’s Cemetery not far from the towns where he lived most of his life, but he was also a profoundly modest man. If he thought he belonged to the “greatest generation,” he never showed it. So it w…
Read More…nd refused the priest’s urging her to have an abortion, he sent her to the Philippines to deliver, where she nearly died. When Rita came back to LA, penniless and with an infant daughter, she told her story to Bishop John Ward. He didn’t get back to her for four months, then told her that the priest she suspected was the father was merely a guest in the LA Archdiocese and not under his jurisdiction. When I called Ward he said to me: “I referred he…
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…idence in 1900 that God had blessed the genocidal American takeover of the Philippines. He seems unaware of how the inevitable hubris associated with the idea of a national (divine) election continues to let Americans ignore what the rest of the world has long perceived as a brutal and bloody imperalism manifesting itself in places like Vietnam and Iran. I mean, how can God’s anointed nation possibly be doing such awful things? Where white America…
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…y, when Pentecostal missionary Lester Sumrall performed an exorcism in The Philippines in 1953, he used it as evidence that his faith had power over demons and Catholicism did not. But at some point, what was at stake in exorcism began to shift again—at least in the popular, Western imagination. The alignment shifted from rivalries between churches to a battle between our disenchanted present and our spiritual past. Before The Exorcist used red fo…
Read More…f a memorandum from President Obama charging US foreign policy agencies to promote LGBT rights said that US efforts have been important to activists promoting equality and facing persecution around the world. Read the Washington Blade’s report here. On Wednesday, the Daily Beast hosted an event called Quorum: Global LGBT Voices that featured interviews with more than 25 activists from around the world to talk about “what is happening on the front…
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…ar. And Anna Su’s recent book, Exporting Freedom, examines the US-occupied Philippines, Japan and Iraq. “[N]o doctrinal position or school can be identified as causing the actions of jihadi groups.” Since 2009, US military chaplains have engaged with local religious leaders overseas to advance American strategic objectives: gathering cultural intelligence, promoting religious tolerance, and patching up relations with local citizens whose lives hav…
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…en used to target activists and journalists in Russia. The bill’s sponsors promote it as a measure to “protect children from harmful information.” Member of Parliament Aldan Smayil said the legislation’s intent was ““to protect children from information that kills the feeling of warmth and humanity, which is harmful to the health and psyche, promotes violence and is, in short, spiritually devastating to the younger generation.” Finland: Marriage E…
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