Religion Dispatches
…from the public. At the Lake Merritt vigil this past Monday, attendants were asked not to bring candles out of respect for those who had died in flames. Instead, they brought glow sticks and cell phones, and for several hours, the sky above the lake lit up, not in the orange, red and yellow of fire, but in eerie shades of blue. Oakland wore the color of grief….
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…the narrow exemption.” Two colleges (Belmont Abbey, which is Catholic, and Colorado Christian University, which is evangelical) have sued the Department of Health and Human Services. In a statement on the Colorado Christian lawsuit, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents both institutions, noted that although not all evangelicals oppose the use of contraceptives, they do consider certain methods of birth control, including Plan B…
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…len movement to charm its way into leadership networks in other countries around the world. In the United States, for example, the movement has a network of schools and interfaith centers, and has been known to provide free trips to American academics to show them the Hizmet activities in Turkey. In the spirit of full disclosure, I am one of those academics who have benefited from a casual association with members of the Hizmet movement in the Uni…
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…Bible Church (outside of Washington DC). I became practically a regular at Salt Lake City’s Temple Square and dabbled in every pesky little denomination and congregation and prophecy conference I could find. But I was no good at exposé. The more I saw to expose, the more of the other I could appreciate and make my own. While Sharlet and Goodstein saw a theocratic beast in their midst, I found only crippling ambivalence. In the end, I didn’t write…
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…y morning in the Raleigh-Durham Airport and I am returning from a business trip I didn’t really want to take. I am dressed in business casual. I’m about as threatening as your average Gund creation. Having a total stranger employed by the government narrate just how he’s going to touch you is strangely erotic in a nation so squeamish about frank discussions of sexuality; especially involving same-gender touching. In public. Yet, here I stand on bi…
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…Prison Fellowship and Watergate felon Religion or Politics? It’s come up a number of times both in the book and in this roundtable; whether The Family is a religious or a political movement; “a political theology”? Randy wrote that: “The author parses this group as a political movement, but that scheme… doesn’t hold. What if he looked at The Family as a religious movement instead, as I think it is?” Jeff just said of the media: “There’s a sense he…
Read More…statehood. All of this wrangling over polygamy had the desired effect and Utah rewrote its constitution to exclude polygamy “forever.” Utah finally won statehood in 1896, after six unsuccessful attempts over 47 years. The bottom line here is that the anti-marriage gang is up to its old tricks, trying to conflate polygamy and marriage equality to create fear and loathing of gays and lesbians. This talking point has an added twist, insinuating that…
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…e, and I always thought of the reader as my traveling companion as I went around Utah knocking on doors. Sometimes things didn’t go according to plan. While some groups invited me to stay over for weeks on end, others threw me out into the street. And occasionally, I would stumble across some drama or intrigue that sucked me right in. But however the adventure unfolded, that’s how it is told—I stayed true to the rollercoaster. And that goes for to…
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…ever heard of him. Wakara was a founding father of the states we now call Utah, California, and New Mexico. He also stole horses by the thousands from the California missions and enslaved hundreds of Paiute Indians, whom he sold at slave auctions in New Mexico and Utah. Wakara was a great and terrible man. But we know little about him. And what we know comes from the archive of his exploits—often called “Indian depredations”—recorded and stored i…
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…ar later this week, on March 3, 4, and 5. On October 15, 1985, the city of Salt Lake City, Utah, was shaken to its core. That morning, a fatal bomb exploded at the office of businessman Steven Christensen; that afternoon, another bomb claimed the life of Kathy Sheets, the wife of one of Christensen’s colleagues, at her suburban home. Many assumed the deaths were related to an investment deal gone sour. However, there was another link that seemed m…
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