Religion Dispatches
…se lives improved when women stopped voting. “It facilitates communication between spouses,” they argue. “A husband, who knows that he will be voting on behalf of two people, and not just himself, becomes less selfish. He learns to listen, because he has to. Meanwhile, a wife is not just encouraged, but required to make her concerns known to her husband. If a wife has her vote and a husband his, it introduces strife and self-interest into the marr…
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…s?” Or does it cause me to view the Bible as merely another supernatural mythos lying behind a fantasy-based experience that distracts me from ordinary daily responsibilities or activities? I won’t be able to resist entering the fray when the beta version is released today, if only to see how we as a culture we are trying to figure out the relationship between play, theology, and performance of belief. If you’re curious to learn of my progress, yo…
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… It seemed just possible that some of you made more money than I did because you deserved to. You made more money because you had more talent and did more work. Of course, there remained the question of how much more deserving you were, of whether either of us, a freelance scribbler or a Wall Street investor, deserved to occupy a whole other financial galaxy than the attendant who took care of our ailing parents, or the farmer who produced our m…
Read More…as happened at most houses—the missionaries always offered to shovel the householder’s snow-packed walk. Just to do a good turn. Plant a seed. Leave a positive impression. Knock as he might, a lot of doors are closing in Mitt Romney’s face these days. Minnesota. Missouri. Colorado. He may very well lose Michigan, the state his father governed. Polls even suggest that Arizona, which has a large LDS population and has been described as a Romney “fir…
Read More…: “Amen! I didn’t used to think so but I do now.” We’ve seen Cameron speak out against homosexuality and embrace the far right agenda by speaking at CPAC, but and it remains to be seen if he’ll embrace the rest of the “biblical worldview” promoted by Vision Forum and Christian Reconstruction: biblical patriarchy, eliminating public education, and any public assistance for the poor, etc. In any case I’ll bet that Monumental will be a contender for…
Read More…mination against a group, then strips it of its language of liberation because the struggle is not the same, down to every last detail, is incomprehensible—and reprehensible. If a group—or class—of people is being blatantly discriminated against not just by churches, but by federal and state governments, and said group, or class, decides to rebel against that discrimination and claim its rightful place as full, tax-paying citizens of the United St…
Read More…earch editor Wright, the University of Texas has launched its own investigation into the integrity of the study. But politically, the integrity of the study may be beside the point. The Witherspoon Foundation and Bradley Foundation apparently wanted a weapon they could use to fight marriage equality and they got it. It’s a safe bet that the Regnerus study will be cited by religious right groups for years to come, the way they have over the past de…
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…ppeals to what governor Scott Walker called “evil”. Americans could indeed use a primer on most world traditions. But what I wonder is how a desire for empathy might square up against the dichotomized language of “evil.” As Amardeep Singh eloquently argues, the hatred directed towards Sikhs might connect to a visceral reaction to embodied religious otherness. How do we move from promoting basic facts to combatting that profane shudder of hatred? T…
Read More…morning, “It’s hard to reason with an idiot.” Or maybe, it’s just hard to use worldly logic on someone who is divinely inspired. But Ed Kilgore really gets inside Akin’s thinking: Very few if any of the people calling for him to step down supported his very recent primary candidacy; most either backed someone else or hoped he’d lose as the weakest of the potential Republican candidates. He represents a very self-conscious hard-core Christian Righ…
Read More…e. (Although I do expect our supplies will run out in about 48 hours because we’re the types that feed the neighbors.) Mitt Romney, this tropical storm is in your wheelhouse. I bet your pragmatic mind is spinning through all the logistics. 72 hour kits for everyone! You can do this!…
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