Religion Dispatches
…of Leo Frank and a host of discriminatory practices against Jews, harassed freed blacks and others by wearing white hoods and engaging in despicable, cowardly, and murderous acts, and enacted numerous policies that forced Native peoples to convert to Christianity. • From the early decades of the twentieth century on through to the end of the twentieth century, white Protestants made sure that Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps on t…
Read More…ound the planet. However, without exception, these are persons whose moral codes and personal dignity mean so much to me that I cannot imagine the world without them or without their advice. They are the ones who remind me about beauty and majesty of the creation. This will be an intense week and I don’t know how much will be worth public consideration. But here I am Oh Lord, Labayk Allahuma Labayk, towards Your house I put my intentions. Take me…
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…r life, respect for property, sobriety, etc. all seem identical to Western codes of conduct, they arise differently in Buddhism. The Decalogue was revealed by divine commandment. In Buddhism, there’s no creator deity. Nor is there any central Buddhist institution, such as a Vatican. Rather, in establishing one of humanity’s first monastic orders, the Buddha set forth a matrix and process of conscious behavior (vinaya) based on actual conduct. As s…
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…virulent that hatred has become. Americans are willing to throw religious freedom and tolerance out the window, a posture all too familiar in the nation’s history and sadly contradictory to the sacred principles upon which this country was founded. Opposition to the construction of a Muslim community center in New York; the brutal attack on a Muslim cabbie; the proposed burning of Qur’ans by a small church that created a media sensation; the pass…
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…lows its own members to divorce and remarry. The church has strict dietary codes, prohibiting coffee, tobacco, and alcohol, which presumably will not be available in heaven, but sees no need to legislate against their sale, even in Utah. There is the assumption that however wicked or wrong a certain behavior might be, it need not overwhelm the efforts of the Latter-day Saints to be righteous, and that, furthermore, God can adequately judge and pun…
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…ps with the spiritually vulnerable are monitored. Helping professions have codes of conduct, professional associations, and other means of making sure their practitioners are on the up and up. Roman Catholicism needs the same. It will never happen without structural changes. Here’s How it Works… The clerical culture that arises from and permeates the Roman Catholic Church is a key part of the noxious mix in which hundreds of thousands of people ar…
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…gical schema? Robertson would say that Haiti’s centuries-long struggle for freedom, sovereignty, and dignity is indeed a demonic project—but it would have been hard for captive Africans in Saint-Domingue to embrace the divine character of their colonizers’ Christian God. What the colonial ruling class understood to be either divine or demonic in the Christian pantheon, the enslaved African laborers had to have understood as one and the same evil f…
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…C) from the very beginnings of the denomination: their holiness and purity codes in the early 20th century forbade the processing or pressing of hair (like Madam C.J. Walker’s revolutionary hair-straightening process.) As the denomination grew in cities during the 1940s, straight hair became the currency of charismatic authority and power for the church mothers and pastors’ wives. Lighter skin, straighter hair, and European features became a preci…
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…uctive technology than the Torah, Talmud, or our medieval and early modern codes could have imagined! Certainly, some things possible in our world had been sufficiently anticipated by earlier Jews that we have a basis for discussion; there were forms of birth control mentioned in the Talmud, for example. And there are even intimations of the questions raised by, say, in vitro fertilization. One ancient text asks about the status of a baby conceive…
Read More…ncerning the complexity of the cell.” Dan Quinn, a spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network, said “They’ve opened the door to junk science.” He said the “complexity of the cell” is undoubtedly an invitation to include language in the textbooks about intelligent design—the idea that life is too complex to have evolved and therefore demands a divine guiding hand. And the phrase “sudden appearance” and “stasis” are codes for the Genesis account of cre…
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