Religion Dispatches
…osexuality Bill to a vote. According to Burroway, Kadaga received a hero’s welcome on her return from a conference in Canada. She is calling criticism leveled against anti-gay persecution in Uganda by the Canadian foreign minister an attack on Uganda’s sovereignty and culture. She reportedly received a hero’s welcome at the airport. “The rally at Entebbe’s airport was organized by religious leaders, former Ethics and Integrity Minister James Nsaba…
Read More
…ial trauma, or a mix of both, are likely to feel comfortable or to be made welcome in traditional religious settings. Those suffering with psychological conditions, says King, “may reject organized religion, or they may seek existential meaning for their distress in spiritual matters. It is hard to assess causality.” The relationship, that is, may be a matter of selection, with those more vulnerable to psychological distress opting out of institut…
Read More
The unexpected announcement of the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI is a welcome breath of fresh air. A human being, even a pope, ought to have the option to say enough is enough, I have done what I can do, and now it is time for someone else to take over. I applaud his move and read it as a sign of hope in a dreary ecclesial scene. Speculation about his health is rampant. As with many elders whose offspring plot to take away the car keys, I susp…
Read More
…ests to step out of the dark. Bishops may well need to brace themselves or welcome with open arms a greater honesty in this matter. Meanwhile, for the gay priest who suffers under the church’s disparagement of his God-given sexuality and is urged to negate an essential part of who he is, the pope’s stated preference not to judge is balm in Gilead. Like this story? Your tax-deductible $5 or $10 will help us pay writers, coders, interns, and editor…
Read More
…adical Right factions. They call on other dissident Rightists, not only to welcome them into the fold, but to lend active support to Israel’s assault on Gaza. In their view, Israel is demonstrating that “ferocious kind of sovereignty,” as The Hebrew Conservative put it, that the West needs to emulate if it wants to get serious about, as the White supremacist ‘14 Words’ slogan puts it, “secur[ing] the existence of our people and a future for white…
Read More
…ramework, to the on-the-ground happenings within the Muslim world—with the welcome exception of Vali Nasr’s brilliant Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean For Our World (Free Press, 2009) and Ben Simpfendorfer’s intriguing The New Silk Road: How a Rising Arab World is Turning Away from the West and Rediscovering China (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009). The Wide Green Smudge Simpfendorfer, fluent in Arabic and Chine…
Read More…rence to “religious freedom” from Romney. Insiders know that the latter is code for exempting individuals and institutions from following government mandates on health care and provisions on anti-discrimination. But to the middle, Romney’s comment surely passed under the radar. And as for Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, even Paul Ryan is for that now. All this in the shadow of an unprecedented legal war against women’s reproductive choices, and an ever-morp…
Read More…s “weird.” The news set off a wave of speculation that weird was, in fact, code for Mormon, and that Obama and team planned to use the word “weird” as a dog-whistle to stoke voters’ antipathies towards Mormonism in 2012. The news set off a wave of cringes among Mormon politicos as well. Because Mormons do recognize “weird” as a word that sticks to us in the American imagination. In 1995, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley declared in an inter…
Read More
…ed values. After all, “religious” or “friendly to religion” is essentially code for deference to the conservative Christian values of exclusion and exceptionalism. If Democrats wish to embody their espoused values of inclusion and freedom for all Americans, they ought to ignore the Republican framing of the question entirely and instead find a better story to tell. Christianity remains hegemonic in American discourse, and that’s a key reason Democ…
Read More
…ind him. He holds in his right hand a ghostly “Q+” (according to some, the code name Trump himself uses when he posts on Q message boards) and the text reads “The World Will Soon Understand/Nothing Can Stop What is Coming,” a direct reference to “The Storm.” As I wrote back in 2020: The QAnoners’ apocalypse, unsurprisingly, is one of political partisan violence, culminating in “The Storm,” when all of the so-called “deep state leaders” will be arr…
Read More