Religion Dispatches
…agency) issues a rule that requires any organization that offers the poor free meals to include meat on its menu, with the single exception of religious organizations that offer only coreligionists free meals. In the statement announcing the new requirement, the government points out that most people do eat meat, and that most doctors believe meat is good for you in the right amounts, since it provides important nutrients that are difficult to fi…
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…l world with adolescence hints at this as a kind of rite of passage—a time betwixt and between childhood and full adult responsibilities. Much like game worlds, it occurs within a space where actions have been stripped of real-world consequences, though from the first, we discover that Zoe has discovered ways to make what happens in this space count: she’s turned to it as a space of religious conversion and political activism. One of the recurring…
Read More…ll, tax-paying citizens of the United States of America, you can damn well bet it is a civil rights movement. Nobody copyrighted the phrase, and nobody can, on one hand say, “Yes, we see that you’re being wronged,” and then say, “but you have no right to work for your civil rights, or to call it a ‘civil rights’ movement.” But the SBC certainly does want it both ways. They work in their “love the sinner, hate the sin” philosophy by being clear tha…
Read More…doctrines and policies. But that doesn’t mean that he “gets religion” any better than the rest of us who report from the pews at the back of the worship hall, or from all of the unauthorized places—homes, schools, street corners, campuses, government—where religion wields major power. A few weeks ago, Mattingly criticized RD for running my story on a recently-installed, openly-gay Mormon congregational leader in San Francisco. Get Religion insist…
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…f? I think this book can go a long way to inform people about the tensions between democracy and social control in American history. And it can teach people a lot about how evangelical Protestant traditions have changed over time, including the ways they have reshaped strategies to engage the political realm. I’m afraid there are no pleasurable parts of this book. In fact, it’s really grim. People with relatively good intentions did bad things. Bu…
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…n these pages that paranoia about the president being the Antichrist stood between Obama and winning over evangelicals, advances this argument again in the Times, noting that these apocalyptic views “could help define the 2012 presidential campaign.” Sutton provides a brief history of the apocalyptic fervor of American evangelicals, and its impact on our politics. But for Democrats pondering over how Obama can win reelection, I found this to be th…
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…n has more embryos than can be transferred, doctors pick the two best, and freeze the remaining embryos for later use. However, the sad fact is that about half of the embryos which are cryopreserved won’t even survive the freezing and thawing process. We take healthy embryos and subject them to a process which offers no direct medical benefit to them, knowing that 50% of them will die in the process. Just imagine the parallel to healthy newborns:…
Read More…ade most memorable by an aggressively wooden one-liner involving a $10,000 bet and Rick Perry, people who are kind of rooting for Mitt Romney (and kind of rooting is as good as he’s polling these days) are suggesting that candidate Romney should start talking about his Mormonism as a means of seeming, well, more human. All along, the conventional wisdom has been that Romney should avoid Mormonism, given the uncertainty it engenders in American vot…
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…s not make a person wicked. Only having the power to change things for the better and using it to change them for the worse can make a person wicked. In short, I moved to the left because I gave you more credit than many of you give yourselves. Yes, I know some of you are scoundrels; what I don’t know is whether some of the activists I’ve met would be any better in your tailor-made shoes. Yet it is you who abide the slander whenever someone cl…
Read More…l, and hard work. With just enough walk-shoveling. That was always a risky bet for a wonky Yankee Mormon. And evidence suggests that it hasn’t worked: evangelical Christians are consolidating behind Rick Santorum. Had Romney not spent the entire first part of his candidacy trying to pass himself off as a regular Christian conservative, he might be in a position to state the obvious: to take the Republican party by the shoulders and make the case t…
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