Religion Dispatches
…to answer for his endorsement of biblical patriarchy. Just this week, New Mexico Republican Steve Pearce, in a new book, writes that “the wife is to voluntarily submit, just as the husband is to lovingly lead and sacrifice” and “the husband’s part is to show up during the times of deep stress, take the leadership role and be accountable for the outcome, blaming no one else.” In 2011, Michele Bachmann had to explain what she meant in a 2006 speech…
Read More…s are powerful. The researchers interviewed 250 transgender individuals in Mexico City. They found that their distress was overwhelmingly correlated with violence and social rejection, but not with anything intrinsic to being transgender. Ergo, they conclude, it’s not a great idea to classify transgender identity as a disorder. A medical diagnosis can provide social legitimacy to people’s experiences, and it can provide access to legal and insuran…
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…e alternative was to ignore most visionaries while selecting just a few to promote as exemplary. Bishop Ricken is savvy: Adele Brise and her Virgin are perfect examples of a safe apparition that poses no threat to the Catholic hierarchy and official doctrines. For one thing, Adele only had three visions of the Lady in shining white, which she immediately confessed to the local priest. For another, the Lady’s messages to Adele were uncontroversial,…
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…forms of the sweat ceremony were used by Indians from Canada into southern Mexico. In the south they’re called temescals and resemble a wet sauna or steam room; tribes in the American Southwest have dry sweats that feature heated rocks but no water, or a fire built inside the sweat with a smoke hole in the center of the lodge. The version that Ray and his followers used in Sedona is considered Plains style, where rocks are heated to glowing in a f…
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…003, when “he voted for an amendment that would repeal President Reagan’s ‘Mexico City Policy’ and allow funding for abortions—and abortion counseling—abroad.” In 1999, “he voted to kill an amendment that would prohibit taxpayer dollars to fund abortions covered by federal health insurance plans… [and] in 1997, [he] voted for an amendment that would remove the Hyde Amendment provisions—which prohibited states from using S-CHIP (State Child Health…
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…lian church talked warmly about annual youth group service trips to Haiti, Mexico, New Orleans, and other “areas in need.” He insisted that these trips had been incredibly important in his personal and spiritual development. But, he said, they were basically extracurricular activities. You went on these trips, and did a presentation at church one week, then that was it. It was just a thing they did for the youth to develop Christian values of char…
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…n the United States as those granted to white Ukrainian refugees at the US-Mexico border in a matter of hours? CBS News foreign correspondent Chris D’Agata provided an unintentionally revealing answer to these questions in February 2022, when he suggested that Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, was an unexpected site of war, because it was “civilized,’’ unlike “Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades.” Though D’Agata provided a f…
Read More…e way the Church has moved over the last decade from counseling members in Mexico against immigration to adopting the equivalent of a “don’t ask don’t tell policy” on matters of immigration status in the United States. As I’ve written before here at RD, I see this as evidence that the LDS Church is showing a willingness to move away from the ultraconservative and nationalistic politics that have defined its multigenerational ethnic core as it embr…
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…e “average citizen” were overshadowed by talk of China, Russia, Venezuela, Mexico, Israel, Iran, Germany, Ukraine, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Yemen, and those faceless “migrants” coming from countries where, according to Trump, violence is actually down (due, we’re left to assume, to their departure). You see, Harris touted that there were no “American military boots on the ground around the world,” as though the US doesn’t have a whopping 750…
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…Trump’s harsh statements about Mexicans. Mueller astutely points out that Mexico boasts the LDS Church’s second largest Mormon population behind the U.S., and that it is “likely that there are today more nonwhite Mormons than white ones.” Given all that, Mormon resistance to Trump’s candidacy clearly grows from both present circumstances and longer historical patterns. The sizeable number of Mormons who have libertarian leanings also may be reset…
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