Religion Dispatches
…like radar, or gay-dar, but for Mormons) ping last night when he tried to manage questions about his tax returns by insisting that he had been “honest in his dealings.” LDS Church members are routinely asked if they are “honest in [their] dealings” when they interview to qualify for LDS temple worship, and those who cannot answer affirmatively cannot participate. Romney has participated in hundreds—if not thousands—of such interviews during his t…
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…ion and conflict, amplify and entrench the religious divisions it seeks to manage, and force political authorities to discriminate between “good” and “bad” religion. Each of these tendencies has implications for the current debate over ISIS. A bigger field of play Religious freedom advocacy singles out individuals and groups for legal protection as religious individuals and collectivities. Positing religion as prior to other affiliations re-politi…
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…, to hesitate considerably at the notion that we know enough about them to manage them,” Beisner wrote in his 1997 book on evangelicals and environmentalism (published by the Acton Institute, a free-market think tank). Beisner was one of the earliest opponents to EPA limits on carbon emissions. In June 2012, Beisner penned a letter to the EPA opposing the agency’s classification of carbon dioxide as a harmful pollutant as well as opposing any limi…
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…to get too big too fast. Then it’s way too big of a monster for anyone to manage. Our movement is currently centered on conferences with big name speakers and book signings. So trying to translate that into a model of community that’s offering a chance for people and families to connect and celebrate life events will require a lot of work in educating people to start the conversation. Humanist communities are the cutting edge, and we’re laying th…
Read More…the 21st century. Here are some key elements of the story Newsweek missed: 1. Spectacular growth rates for the LDS Church once predicted by non-LDS sociologists have failed to materialize. In fact, despite a substantial international missionary force, LDS Church growth rates are flatlining in the U.S. and internationally. 2. With much of the Church’s growth being among US Latinos and in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, tensions between the pol…
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…thers. It’s a strikingly similar list as the one composing the backers of a 1993 Parental Rights Amendment, following the Christian Coalition’s adoption of parents’ rights as a key issue. Then as now, Michael Farris helped draft the legislation. The Detroit Free Press reported on April 30 that for much of the treaty’s 20-year history, opponents have claimed that it would ban parents from: spanking their children, directing their children’s church…
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…s them,’ a Manichean struggle between ‘allies’ and ‘enemies.’ If you’re not 100% with me, you’re against me, and I have to put you on blast.” Where does all this leave the exvangelical community going ahead? We certainly need exvangelical voices to continue to be heard, and I still believe that we can only move the needle on the national discussion around evangelicalism if we act collectively. I also agree with Stollar when he says, “There’s absol…
Read More…l and harmful, because the more we stigmatize, the less we can effectively manage and treat STIs. And that hurts people. With more serious infections, like syphilis and HIV, it can kill people. Where is the moral wrong, then: in having contracted the infection, or in creating a culture that impedes people’s ability to get treated? To be sure, the rabbis weren’t perfect, and their model doesn’t solve every problem with STI stigma. They were a patri…
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…ry conservative religious tradition that remade the Republican Party in the 1980s and 1990s had already learned to discount expert knowledge and mainstream institutions like journalism and universities. As I argued earlier in “The Religious Origins of Fake News” here in Religion Dispatches, fundamentalist Christians long constituted their identity through a demurral on two intrinsically modern bodies of knowledge – evolution and the historical-cri…
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…en, and friends, and to block of the needs of the world outside, but many a 1950s-model corporate dad seemed to manage that level of workaholic interpersonal distraction with only a newspaper and a neat cocktail after coming home late for dinner. At the other end of the spectrum, fantasies that the application of new technologies to traditional practices will, in themselves, enrich life in general and spirituality in particular are no less misgu…
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