Religion Dispatches
…ss claim to the holiday than many other nonbelievers. A few years ago, The New York Times profiled a few atheists who were practicing Lent, and many of them were doing so because they had grown up Catholic and no longer believed. John Corvino, an atheist and author of What’s Wrong with Homosexuality?, grew up Catholic and appreciates Lent’s capacity for fostering self-discipline. But is it fair for me to practice something I never did as a child?…
Read More
…That’s it. That’s the detail that got me. A child desperately needing to trust a caring adult. A child shot to pieces for needing and trusting. Because of a cop’s incompetence. The teachers were the heroes The boy’s eyewitness account is more damning in context. The Washington Post reported Thursday that, with his rifle, the shooter strolled into the school “unobstructed.” Officials had said he encountered three cops. First, an in-school cop. The…
Read More
…over the causes of the shooting rampage. Some, such as Ruth Graham of the New York Times, have pointed to the gunman’s exposure to the toxic sexual purity culture common to the evangelical world, and how it breeds self-loathing and misogyny. But members of the AAPI community (as well as RD senior correspondent Chrissy Stroop) have pushed back on this explanation, not without good reason. They point to “sex addiction” being used by law enforcement…
Read More…d Ahmadi Muslims as “wajib-ul-qatl” or “worthy of death.” For example, the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shezad, a United States citizen, was recruited and trained by the Tehrik-e-Taliban — the very group that proudly claimed responsibility for the May 28th attacks on the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Lahore. In short, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community courageously seeks to defend Islam in the face of bitter persecution and hostility. Groups like the A…
Read More
The real Mormon moment is now. Now that the New York Times is confirming that at least a dozen Mormons nationwide have faced or are facing discipline for criticizing Church practices or policies or voicing support for same-sex marriage or women’s ordination on-line, on Facebook, on Twitter. Even in anonymous chat rooms. That the LDS Church supports what must be a substantial enterprise monitoring the on-line communications of its members—this is…
Read More
…xpresses God’s fiery heart.” Whatever that means, the book inserts so many new words, clauses, and ideas, that it’s about 50% longer than other translations.). Next, she read the creationist classic Genesis 1:27 and then Deuteronomy 22:5, which says that women wearing men’s clothes or vice versa is “an abomination to the Lord.” Bentley tediously opined, “Father God is proud of who he created each of us to be and to deny who you are is to deny that…
Read More
…nt once showed the world that working class people could lead middle class lives. But in our lifetime we have become among the world’s most unequal societies, with an economy defined by wage stagnation. Close and sober analysis shows that the key political and economic driver of this sinister transformation has been the continued power of those who are still able to maintain plantation capitalism in the South while seeking to spread it elsewhere….
Read More…. His reply: I thought it was tasteless. I thought he was allowing the New York Times and the Southern Poverty Law Center and People for the American Way to dictate the content of his speech, which I think was a mistake for him to do at the Values Voters Summit. That was kind of an insult to the people in the room. . . . I don’t think it helped him. I then asked Fischer whether he though only an evangelical Christian was qualified to be president…
Read More…of all pregnancies in this country are unplanned, with poor women now five times more likely than higher-income women to have an unplanned pregnancy, and six times more likely to have an unplanned birth, according to the Guttmacher Institute’s recent analysis of government data… Poorer women suffer when they have unintended births—as do their children. Research shows that women with unplanned pregnancies are more likely to smoke, drink, and go wit…
Read More
…concern prevailed. The brethren expressed considerable unease about a destructive bias in the news concerning Islam and deemed it imperative that the Mormon faithful be sensitive to Muslims and properly educated as to their beliefs. These aspects of the Mormon Leaks videos resonate with my own grassroots experience of the faith as an earnest community that seeks to be of service, and especially to be kind. While this may seem to clash with positi…
Read More