Religion Dispatches
…resents a strong, independent voice. She’s been selected as a “Champion of Change” by the White House, calls Trump a “fascist” on national television, has been arrested by the NYPD at a Black Lives Matter protest, and works tirelessly to advocate for social justice for all Americans. The power of having a Muslim-American woman speaking resolutely against Islamophobic sentiments is something to celebrate. As anthropologist and Columbia professor Li…
Read More…ligious groups—who sponsor it. There has to be an entire ecosystem to make change possible. But it’s very incremental. Don’t be fooled by the fundraising appeals that tell you “we’ve got the NRA on the run!” What will finally cause change, as I’ve often argued, is voting people out of office. That’s why the sit-in worked. Republicans are vulnerable this year, and they’re going to get hammered on gun control, among many other issues. But yes, value…
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…me of the most affecting. Getting out is a matter of the person wanting to change. They have to be ready to accept that they might be wrong and to take real accountability and make amends with their loved ones. The book’s conclusion flatly confirms that some will not change, and loved ones must let them go, grieve, and move on without them if they can. As a journalist, Cook wrote an article about families affected by QAnon and got many more emails…
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…go to a temple and you make an offering. How did your opinion of Buddhism change when you came to the United States? When I started learning Vipassana, everything changed. I became a real Buddhist. The dharma you see in America is pure, as opposed to Asian Buddhism in which you go to a temple and there’s nothing else. I have credibility in saying that because I’ve seen both sides. Not that American Buddhism is free of problems, but it’s the pures…
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…al effect on state or local governments. This is because there would be no change to the manner in which marriages are currently recognized by the state. Recently, Brown’s office changed the language to say that Proposition 8 seeks to “eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry.” The title of the initiative is now: “ELIMINATES RIGHT OF SAME- SEX COUPLES TO MARRY. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT” and it reads: Changes California Constitut…
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…ighted I was to hear that critique from a bishop! She explained that every change happens at the local level; people need to figure out tough issues in their own context. Instead, mainline churches with global connections sometimes look far afield. Some, like the Methodists and the Episcopalians, default to the constricting policies of their partners in the south, for example in Africa. She observed that when denominations yield to those int…
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…t on the integrity of this three pounds of tissue in our skulls. When that changes, you change too. When it comes to these questions of who am I?, that’s got to be a part of our understanding. And yeah, it is a little scary, I agree. We have this illusion of continuity, that we are a single individual that lasts through time. This is, of course, the very natural intuition that led to ideas about an immortal soul. But in fact we’re completely tied…
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…an and a man.” Australia: Priest takes on ‘gay panic defense’; hate speech change debated The parliament of Queensland abolished the “gay panic” defense – a term for the theory that a straight person’s response to a homosexual advance could somehow justify downgrading a murder charge. Paul Kelly, a Catholic priest, was moved to lead a public campaign for the change after the 2008 murder of a gay man on his church grounds; the killers were convicte…
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…o be bending too far in one direction. Scientists are human. We’re slow to change, we have our pet theories. We’re not Mr. Spock. Our expectations are shaped by how we want things to turn out. That’s one of the reasons for the peer-review process. I’ve heard the idea that science advances generationally, that ideas change when one generation who expected them to turn out one way dies out. We need more respectful discussion. You know, when I read…
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…st another form of conversion therapy, defined as methods that “attempt to change sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression change or suppression efforts.” Tim Long, a former student of Nicolosi Jr, even revealed this similarity when he told an IFTCC audience in 2019 that the “new” method is nothing but a rebranding, aiming to avoid political discrediting: Doctor Nicolosi Sr coined the term ‘reparative therapy’ for his treatment….
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