Religion Dispatches
…ation on violence, death, sin, and the hope for forgiveness, with lyricist Jordan Dreyer’s narrator entering the dreamscape with a desire to capture the deeper meaning of the tragedy: I want to write it all down so I can always remember. If you could see it up close how could you ever forget how senseless death, how precious life. I want to be there when the bullet hit. As the dream draws to the end of the episode, the narrator listens in on a fin…
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…at the question. I thought she might reference Catholic historian Mark D. Jordan’s Authorizing Marriage?: Canon, Tradition, and Critique in the Blessing of Same-Sex Unions (Princeton 2006) with its careful approach to sources and texts. I figured she would conclude by sending her readers to a very useful Web site on the topic, developed by the Marriage Project of the Center for Lesbians and Gay Studies at the Pacific School of Religion at the Gra…
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…appears in both the 9th-c BCE victory inscription of Mesha, king of Moab (Jordan), and the ~7th-c BCE victory inscription of Karrib-Ilu, king of Saba’ (Yemen). More strikingly, Jews who were threatened with violence by empires, such as Rome, which they viewed as occupying powers, continued to ambivalently praise Abraham’s willingness to perform child sacrifice. A legend that first appears in 2 Maccabees 7 praises a mother and her seven sons for d…
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…al youth. And in late May, within the space of a week, evangelical blogger Jordan Steffaniak and celebrity author Francis Chan both offered their “solutions” to the “problem.” In a fit of what sure looks like protesting too much, some of these panicking souls, including Steffaniak, can’t help but tell readers how glad they are to not be us. Such rhetoric belies an obvious, and frankly obviously desperate, attempt to keep the exvangelical bugbear w…
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…entirely derivative. “One of Us” The American Center for Law and Justice’s Jordan Sekulow, a conservative evangelical and Republican activist who touts Tea Party victories, tweeted on election night that Rand Paul’s victory in Kentucky was one for “constitutional conservatives” because “he is one of us”—meaning one of those people who believes the Constitution was a divinely-inspired document and that government shouldn’t legislate rights beyond w…
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…of the meaning of sexuality. The work being done by theologians like Mark Jordan, Mary Hunt, and Christine Gudorf, that seeks to situate sexuality in a justice paradigm rather than contractual or sacramental heterosexual marriage could make a real contribution to the work of anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists in developing new models and in educating millions of people, especially young people. This will require a new under…
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…ng arrangement under which the site was administered by a special trust in Jordan is coming unglued under unrelenting pressure by ultra-orthodox Jews who want to see a Third Temple erected there. Leading Israeli politicians pander to these pressures, making their own provocative statements. Worse, these same politicians backed versions of a proposed nationality law—hugely controversial in Israel and among American Jews, including the ADL’s Abe Fox…
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…Silk to mean that “Republicans and churchgoers” (with churchgoers overtly coded as Evangelicals) are supporting polygamy in larger numbers, a strawman Douthat then refutes. Unlike Silk and Douthat, I welcome this nascent debate—one that really has already begun (see this and this)—and I think there’s enough praise to go around for why we’ve begun to have it. Both point to important contributing factors, yet both are mistaken in focusing, when it…
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…up… “Palestine is our land and nation from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river, from north to south, and we cannot cede an inch or any part of it,” he said. –Al Jazeera, Dec. 9, 2012 Last week B’nai Jeshurun (a.k.a. BJ), an independent progressive synagogue in Manhattan, made the front page of the New York Times after its leadership sent a membership-wide email applauding the UN vote granting Palestinians non-member “state” status. Whi…
Read More…tocratic Sunni heads of state, such as Hosni Mubarak, King ‘Abdullah II of Jordan, and King ‘Abdullah I of Saudi Arabia, fear the increased popularity of Twelver Shi‘ism, which they connect with the regional influence of Iran, which is ruled by a Twelver Islamist government. Limited “conversions” of Sunni Syrians and Palestinians following the Summer 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah—the Lebanese Shi‘i political party and paramilitary organiza…
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