Religion Dispatches
…e considered evidence for what those who have undergone ex-gay therapy say about it, but nothing more,” Spitzer told Arana. Activists like Wayne Besen with Truth Wins Out celebrated the retraction saying, “Spitzer just kicked out the final leg from the stool on which the proponents of ‘ex-gay’ therapy based their already shaky claims of success.” The ex-gay industry (quite understandably) has a love-hate relationship with Spitzer already. It was a…
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…biblical fidelity, also seem to be influenced by the culture’s uncertainty about what truth is, who Jesus is, and how sinners are saved,” adding, “These results reveal an urgent need for clear biblical teaching.” Such sentiments are not atypical. For example, prominent never-Trump conservative commentator David French maintains, unconvincingly, that a better “political theology” would prevent his fellow evangelicals from jumping on the bandwagon w…
Read More…the context of their families. We hope to contribute to that. This work is about supporting families with science that can help them understand the kinds of health outcomes that are likely when they practice accepting and rejecting behaviors. Families play a crucial role in protecting LGBT young people against major health risks. How did you come to develop materials for LDS families specifically? I’ve been working with LDS communities since the m…
Read More…icted by Trivers-Willard. And when it comes to humans, a man tends to have about as many children as another man, and about as many children as a woman has. Stories of sultans with 900 children notwithstanding, humans are generally characterized by a much lower variance in male reproductive fitness than other closely related species, because of the institution of marriage. Once again, without the “if” statement, there is no “then” statement. Those…
Read More…he latest bloggingheads, I talk to the Religious Institute’s Debra Haffner about the legacy of former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who passed away on Monday at the age of 96. In this clip, Haffner describes how, despite his personal opposition to abortion, Koop refused to let ideology get in the way of science in concluding there was no evidence abortion harms women. Anti-choice activists still hail Koop for his role, with Francis Schaeffer, i…
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…r weeping during the show,” Toscano said. So, he asked himself, what is it about this story about transgender people that moves the straight and the gay and the many in between? He said he thinks these transgender stories touch some universal part of people. The part that looks in the mirror and sometimes has trouble recognizing the person there. The part that worries about gaining weight or getting older. The part that is worried about change. An…
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…t with enthusiastic if sometimes bemused support from Bell. Still thinking about Bell’s audience a couple weeks later when I spoke to him, I asked him about all those group-builders; did he get that a lot? The “spiritual entrepreneurs,” he said, are indeed “pretty typical,” for this tour. So many people at the Experience, in fact, had announced that they came from out of town with their own spiritual entrepreneurship project, that someone asked us…
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…ving the impression of life, automata and robots push us to ask what it is about living beings that may be machinelike—and what, if anything, about life is distinct from a material mechanism. In the sense that SES is using a robot to explore deep questions, says Riskin, “there’s some continuity here.” In a technical sense, too, D.A.V.I.D.’s lineage goes straight back to the church. Those Catholic automata gave rise to machines used purely for plea…
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…I genuinely did ask myself, “What if they are right? What if they’re right about America and the world and about me and we’re all going to hell because this little band of believers in Kansas is right about all this?” That wasn’t made up for dramatic purposes. This is something that I really thought about, and as I met people I tried my best to put myself in their shoes, behind their glasses, and read scripture as they read it and understand it. E…
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…ned. It says nothing about theology proper. It asks one to believe nothing about God or the nature of Jesus Christ, nothing about miraculous births or saving deaths, nothing about eternal salvation. It says everything, though, about identity. We human beings are naturally clannish and partisan: we are defined by who we are not. We are not them. This creed claims that there is no us, no them. We are all one. We are all children of God. In Christ Je…
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