Religion Dispatches
…sis of the past decade); and the uninspiring forms of industrial warfare still alive and none-too-well in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are also some new trends worth tracking, and Religion Dispatches was formed in large measure to enable better reflection upon them. The first has to do with the continued advances in contemporary communications technologies. RD serves a population that will continue to receive more and more of its news and informa…
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…e Center for New Community (CNC), a national nonprofit that helps build local alliances among congregations from different faith traditions and other institutions seeking to resist bigotry and build “a democratic future based on human rights, justice, and equality.” Eric Ward now works at the CNC. From his office outside Chicago, Ward asks people to consider to whom is America supposed to be “restored?” When Ward hears a white protest leader tell…
Read More…to Vatican loyalty change the Catholic Church? The Anglican Church? What will all this church resistance to cultural change mean for equality in the future? As I have reported on RD previously, the media tends to greatly exaggerate the death of the Anglican Communion. In this instance, they made the mistake of assuming that UK Anglicans function like their US counterparts. A quick romp through church history will reveal that US Episcopal pioneers…
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…out “spiritual not religious” begs the question of whether the sacred is really real (as one of my teachers used to say) or just a figment of the imagination, whether found in a sacred text, a towering institution, or on a… (wait for it)… soccer field. So who’s got the scorecard, the measuring stick, the scientific instrument to pinpoint and demarcate what counts as religion versus what is beyond the pale. Where to draw the line between delusional…
Read More…eological proposition, one that has no place in public discourse. My original analogy between guns and religion is limited, and this is the point where it breaks down. If a citizen successfully intervenes to stop a crime with the use of a weapon, it is the person behind the gun, and not the gun itself, that is given credit. This may indeed be because guns are often used on both sides of the transaction, both to commit crime and to stop it. But is…
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…stroyed by fire for another five months. This wasn’t a new date. They knew all along that October 21 was significant. Believers concluded it was God’s merciful nature that had spared the unsaved the terror and torment of an earthquake. “If we have to endure til October 21, I’ll prayerfully do it with a merry heart,” a believer wrote online. While there were no public displays in the lead up to October 21, there were powerful private emotions. “Of…
Read More…lica of biblical Jerusalem in rural Utah as a set for a series of educational films about the life of Jesus. Utah State University is conducting a study on the experiences of gay Mormons. Also, the Mormon Defense League has been launched to combat anti-Mormonism in the media. In case you need them, here are some tips on Ramadan etiquette. The Crystal Cathedral is trying to raise money to cover its $50 million debt and says the megachurch building…
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…ce for this leftist anti-Christian jihad, especially from someone who several paragraphs later says she is making a plea for “a certain amount of dispassionate care in the coverage of religion”? Miller writes, “Certain journalists” (no names here), use ‘dominionist’ the way some folks on Fox News use the word ‘sharia.’ Its strangeness scares people. Without history or context, the word creates a siege mentality in which ‘we’ need to guard against…
Read More…ay people are both predators and a foreign infiltration that undermines local values. As the Rev. Kapya Kaoma, author of a report on anti-LGBT evangelism in Africa, told RD’s Kathryn Joyce last year: When he goes to Uganda, he’s not known as Scott Lively, but as an American evangelical… The Africans don’t always have the resources to follow their statements so they say: this man of God says this is going on in the world. Or Scott Lively goes to th…
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…onstituencies quickly materialized around the dueling hashtags #IStandWithDalaiLama and #DalaiLamaPedo. Whatever the truth may be—how that boy experienced his physical encounter with the 14th Dalai Lama or what his intentions were—the controversy demonstrates the long-standing practice of constructing the Dalai Lamas according to the cultural and political prerogatives of the West. It was not so long ago that the cause of Tibetan independence and…
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