Religion Dispatches
…d appeared the year before, and Mark Zuckerberg was feverishly writing the code that would become Facebook. YouTube was just an idea, and wouldn’t appear online in any form until 2005. John Paul did embrace social media as it existed then. He was the first pope to use SMS to send out a daily message to Catholics in 2004, after brokering a deal with Verizon—one of the first troubling commercial agreements between the Vatican and communications comp…
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…the New Apostolic Reformation, the largest religious movement in recent American history, has unabashed, undemocratic, and well documented political aspirations. While that alone is not unusual, what is important here is that, because apostles and prophets of the NAR are recognized by their followers, and each other, as being in direct communication with God, a decree from an apostle is understood as a statement of direction from God. It’s also im…
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…problem. We need to do a much better job of platforming and listening to African-American atheists. Anyway, as for the Democrats’ exasperatingly quixotic commitment to chasing the white evangelical vote, Michael Wear is a white evangelical whose brand relies on the belief that white evangelicals can be won over by Democrats, so he’s clearly far from unbiased. I’m with Burge, and I’m glad someone with his credentials is making the case against Demo…
Read More…pany of the Mayflower Hotel, no less. Broden, who is one of thirty or so African-American Republicans running for Congress this year, is a pastor — yes, a pastor — supported by the Frederick Douglass Foundation, whose chair, Timothy Johnson (also vice-chair of the North Carolina Republican Party), has a violent criminal record. Broden is a tea party favorite who has spoken at tea party rallies and who claimed at Michele Bachmann’s Code Red rally a…
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…action. They would need to support the efforts of groups like the anti-war Code Pink that resorts to reason, empirical evidence and visibility to challenge U.S. development policies, or the Platform for the Movement for Black Lives, (one of the most advanced and inclusive political visions ever articulated), or the Fight for $15 movement that successfully campaigned to raise the minimum wage in many parts of the country. It would mean standing in…
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…l in 2014, month, is now available in English. The documentary features American anti-gay activist Scott Lively warning that in America most people oppose homosexuality but are too afraid of the powerful gay lobby to speak about it. Lively eventually appears on camera to rail against the LGBT-friendly “Queen James Bible,” which he calls “an abomination before God.” “There is no sacred ground for the homosexuals,” Lively says. “There is nothing tha…
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…al “symbologist” character played by Tom Hanks in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Semiotics is mostly dense philosophy and linguistics with a dash of neuroscience thrown in. The deep semiotics of health is an attempt to recognize the signs and symbols of health and to take control over the largely unconscious processes that affect our minds-brains-bodies. The mash-up of these terms is necessary in light of contemporary science. Let me explain. Psyc…
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……“While some Kenyan leaders have attempted to paint homosexuality as ‘un-African,’ the African Commission resolution cements what many African human rights advocates have long said – that it is violence and exclusion that are un-African,” said Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Kenya should uphold this resolution and protect, rather than persecute, sexual and gender minorities, at the coast and wherever anti-LGBT violence exist…
Read More…ose either secretly or overtly a Taliban-like, religious, strict religious code upon all Americans, which is ridiculous.” Honor killings, forced marriages, female genital mutilation, and other abuses are “un-Islamic,” he said, adding that there is “no debate among serious Muslim scholars about that.” As far as fear-mongering that that Muslims seek to supplant the Constitution with shari’ah, Khan noted, “there is room for individual religious pract…
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…ial justice. He joined his father’s movement for racial justice in South Africa and spent over a decade in South African prisons. As Arun Gandhi noted in Kasturba: A Life, a biography of his grandmother, “my father was the only one of the four Gandhi sons to adopt voluntary poverty and devote his life to nonviolence…” Arun left South Africa in 1956 and moved to India, where he spent the next thirty years working as a journalist, activist, and soci…
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