Religion Dispatches
…began, actually, in the show’s original 1966 pilot, in which the character Number One (played by creator Gene Roddenberry’s wife, Majel Barrett) showed none of the emotional hysteria expected of onscreen women at the time. Deemed too racy by the network, her demeanor was given to Spock, the half-Vulcan who spent the next three years’ worth of episodes struggling to stay logical amid the raging passions of his friends. While Spock was always trying…
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…nts Reform Judaism; Muslims and other non-Christian groups arrive in large numbers. But this is primarily a story of how religion has interacted with some of the big events of American history. American religious expression—its music and art, its stories of internal spiritual quests, its embodiment, its wild profusion of utopian groups, its history of ritual practices—will have to be found elsewhere. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. God…
Read More…bs don’t fit into the “Abercrombie look.” A federal judge has overturned a Nebraska ban on flag mutilation, allowing the members of the Westboro Baptist Church to continue trampling the American flag at protests so long as they do so peacefully. Ten men in Algeria were arrested for eating during daylight in a restaurant during the fasting month of Ramadan. Is religion a taboo topic in sports? I’m not sure. These guys seem to want to talk about it:…
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…g. It tells us that a group that helped end the death penalty in red-state Nebraska has little pull with a national GOP. The GOP is now beholden to its most racist elements, and religious groups who resonate most with the GOP’s conservative social agenda are paralyzed to say or do anything to stop the spectacle from speaking. As much political capital as Latino/a evangelical elites think they have purchased from the GOP, I’m afraid they have it ba…
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…wrinkle. Thirty years earlier, in Marsh v. Chambers, SCOTUS ruled that the Nebraska legislature’s decision to hire a chaplain to open each legislative session with a non-sectarian prayer did not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution. AU argues that Greece is different for several reasons, according to Boston: One, the prayers are sectarian. Two, it’s local government. In a statehouse or in U.S. Congress, the p…
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…arious constituencies: Southern Baptists from Tennessee, evangelicals from Nebraska, and progressive Christians from Chicago. In fact, my wall sometimes feels like a mashup of Bill Gaither, Rob Bell, and Amanda Palmer—a quality I liken to our wonderfully pluralistic public square (whatever is left of it, at least). Among the multiple comments that were made, there was one that especially caught my eye. A friend of mine linked to this article by St…
Read More…e ACLU is suing the jail for its sola scriptura policy. A Muslim inmate in Nebraska is suing Lancaster County because he was served pork while in custody. Senate candidate Sharon Angle’s former pastor denounced her opponent Harry Reid’s Mormonism, calling the Latter-day Saints a cult. Meanwhile, Angle herself warned that Muslim law was taking over cities in the United States. Posting about religion may lose you Facebook friends. Disney is marketin…
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…and I know L.A. I wouldn’t be able to discuss what the Jewish community in Nebraska feels like. But in my experience I’ve found we’re much more comfortable in our own skin than other communities. It says something good about America but I don’t know what. One thing that was interesting to me in these stories is how the American Jewish experience changes over generations. In “His Grandmother’s Memory,” the protagonist’s grandmother, who left Poland…
Read More…ly of the ideological roots of the Christian Right. Sarah Posner dissected Nebraska Senate candidate Ben Sasse’s dissertation here on RD, noting that according to Sasse, the “roots of the modern religious right lie in the 1962 and 1963 Supreme Court decisions striking down mandatory public school prayer and Bible reading.” According to Sasse, those decisions “touched a nerve” among the grassroots, which led to the subsequent rise of the right as a…
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…ic systems to gobble up secular hospitals and impose the ERDs on them. The number of Catholic hospitals increased by 22% between 2001 and 2016 following an earlier waver of mergers, according to a report by MergerWatch. Market consolidation by Catholic providers will also allow these systems to dominate insurance contracts, which often results in patients being forced to choose hospitals from a single health system, which in the case of Catholic p…
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