Religion Dispatches
…a heterosexual couple Try as they might to paint the distinction between “marriage” and “civil partnerships” as something to celebrate, Christian Today merely reminds us why no one is truly equal until we all are….
Read More…fabricated scandal isn’t going away anytime soon, though. It’s a perfect crucible for interrelated Republican cause celebres that all serve as election season fodder: that the Obama administration “promotes abortion;” that contraceptives are like a gateway drug for abortion; and that the Obama administration is depriving the Catholic Bishops of their religious liberty. But the Democrats could easily turn this around on the Republicans. Should rap…
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…entify in some way as “Jewish” while not being Jewish is fascinating. In a world where very recently being “Jewish” was a liability and anti-semitism was palpable, the number of non-Jews today who identify as Jewish seems historically distinctive. We could, perhaps, point to the so-called “fearers of heaven,” an undocumented community of Hellenes in late antiquity who lived in large Jewish population centers, apparently lived partially as Jews, an…
Read More…the end of religion. I’d like more bottom-up stories about what kinds of religion, or irreligion, get people through their day—along with analyses of religion’s ever-evolving role in politics, culture and society. As for branding, “Post-Religion Dispatches from a More or Less Still Religious World” seems like a lot to say….
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…ere were few greater acts to earn merit in God’s eyes. (Compare Abu Bakr’s rules of war, as delivered to his army, to ISIS’ practices. I pronounce the Prophet’s best friend a better interpreter of Islam than poorly reconstructed Ba’athists on the Muslim margins.) Suleiman stressed: “Freeing slaves” is so frequently mentioned as a meritorious act in the Muslim tradition that, in the 8th and 9th centuries, biographies of Prophetic companions cited,…
Read More…and 2012. I loathe to say this, but what if the 1984 massacre had happened today? Could the ruthless terror unleashed on innocent Sikhs have been curtailed before it became a trauma of magnifying proportions that the world continues to remain oblivious to? Could the effects of that trauma have been lessened? Even today it is only a handful of what sociologist Arlene Stein calls ‘memory-workers’ who are using the internet in defining 1984 as a trau…
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…gs like falling off a cliff or getting eaten by beasts. But in this modern world of ours today, there aren’t these sorts of physical perils (again, so he imagines) and so healthy fear has given way to chronic and nebulous anxiety. This is especially bad when a fancypants civilized woman has to do something primitive, like carry and bear a child. Then ALL KINDS of zany, unheard-of stuff goes wrong: When a woman whose nervous system has been invaded…
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…mented memory of supersessionism at their disposal, Catholic intransigents today never tire of calling out this uneasy disjunction between a dense supersessionist past and a shallow progressivist present. Finally, what does the Orthodox Presbyterian rejection of moves like the Vatican’s decision to squelch supersessionism tell us? Does it warn of an excess of theological subtlety and complexity? Does it speak to an appetite of the popular religiou…
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…h, I’m still trying to pull out what it means to be black and LGBTQ in the world today. I’m really curious as to how faith impacts the LGBTQ community to do social justice work. How does your faith influence your activism? That’s the next step I want to take. I also want to continue working in the Black Lives Matter movement, but I’m also rolling around in my head how to bring the intersections of oppression more vividly to the forefront in my nex…
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…. Robinson Oxford University Press, April 2016 This premise isn’t exactly true; race is a construct—a shifting template created by human beings and applied to human bodies. To be clear, constructs are real. Racial categories are meaningful to anyone who lives within them (i.e. everyone), and this whole conversation could sound utterly irrelevant to, say, a black woman who’s just been pulled over by the police. Still, not to get too circular here,…
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