Religion Dispatches
…sexist and patriarchal. So, that’s not what I mean either. If he was alive today, I am not exactly sure where King would stand on the issue of reproductive rights. King was a dialectical thinker. Thus, he could be both pro-life and pro-choice concomitantly, taking what he needed from one side or the other and rejecting the rest, and thus forcing the rest of us to consider the possible “good” on all sides as well as the inconsistencies of our own p…
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A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a piece on religion in Russia that started ominously: “It was not long after a Methodist church put down roots here that the troubles began…” This noir-ish line was the lead-in for an article that went on to describe the harassment of Protestant worshipers, some of whom claim to fear for their lives. A prominent Orthodox cleric is quoted as referring to Protestants as “heretics… like the soldiers who crucif…
Read More…o understand the different conceptions of religious freedom at play in the world today, their different social and political contexts, and their varied histories. Neither my work nor our project takes a position for or against religious freedom. To assume that it does is a misunderstanding of what is in fact a much broader and more encompassing set of research aims and objectives. We are interested in laying out the kind of work advocacy for relig…
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…er the November 2010 elections, Barton, Newt Gingrich, and Jim Garlow (who runs Gingrich’s Renewing American Leadership group), held a conference call with pastors to celebrate conservative political gains. On the call, Garlow and Barton asserted a biblical underpinning for far-right economic policies: Taxation and deficit spending, they said, amount to theft, a violation of the Ten Commandments. The estate tax, Barton said, is “absolutely condemn…
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…es at the latest table like A.R. Bernard, the African-American pastor of a New York megachurch, who calls on evangelicals to focus on “systemic injustices that most concern black evangelicals, such as economic inequality and radicalized policing.” Bernard, to his credit, left Trump’s religious advisory council in the wake of white nationalist violence in Charlottesville. And World Relief vice president Jenny Yang will also be there to push for a c…
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…If I am to answer truthfully, I must say that we have lost ground in the struggle for a true revolution of values during the course of these 50 years. We are still in the struggle, but we have lost ground. We see today the commodification of nearly every aspect of our lives: commodification in health care, in education, and even commodification within democracy itself, with the Supreme Court ruling that money is speech and that corporations are es…
Read More…ut it is hard to conceive of an organizational culture more allergic to disruption than today’s gender-segregated, regionally- and racially-dominated, hierarchical, and gerontocratic LDS bureaucratic culture. For their part, advocates of LDS women’s ordination are well versed in the dimensions of Mormon history and theology deprioritized by the bureaucratic church, and history may be on their side. Recently released historical records suggest that…
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…or the burgeoning “religious freedom” efforts we’re seeing so much more of today. But apart from the particularities of each state, there’s a fairly simple and reasonable solution to the religious freedom conundrum, though it requires the very distinctions between the public and private spaces Gjelten fails to delineate. The First Amendment’s prohibition on state establishment of religion can reasonably be read to mean that government agencies—and…
Read More…the law of the land, according to Adam Liptak. Writing recently in the New York Times, Liptak calculates the date based on how long after Loving v. Virginia in 1967 that anti-miscegenation laws were struck down, allowing interracial marriage. That was 13 years after Brown v. Board of Education ended racial segregation in schools. Liptak compares Brown with Lawrence v. Texas, the watershed gay rights ruling that saw the Supreme Court strike down so…
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…in being a good citizen and participating in communal and political life. And I think being a veteran allows me more space than others might have to follow this belief without pushback. We have a saying in my own religious tradition: that “praying shapes believing.” In other words, the words, symbols, and rituals that we use to express our faith become our faith, and predict our actions. So when a child comes home convinced that she is “praying t…
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