Religion Dispatches
…. You shot four bullets into him, sir. He was just getting his license and registration, sir.” We feel her exquisite pain: emotionally, yes, but also morally. The good guy with the gun is not so good. As for the bad guy with the gun, he wasn’t bad at all. He wasn’t even reaching for his weapon. Historically, the dueling ritual was widely tolerated in the American colonies. After the birth of our republic, the practice persisted, surviving well int…
Read More…ng that Cantor “wants to herd even more gun owners into a federal database registration system.” Cantor, the ad went on, “doesn’t sound like a Virginian or a Republican anymore. Eric Cantor sounds like someone else”—another bogeyman, Barack Obama. That ad was pretty clear: he’s not one of us. But was that because he was Jewish, or because he briefly diverged from firearms orthodoxy? In any case, it can now be said that in terms of representation i…
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…oss his face in moments of encounter with that ugliness. But it’s merely a registration of the fact that suffering is inescapable. Father James moves on, full speed ahead, to compassion. Nonetheless, the film depicts the kind of place where the town tart wears a leopard print coat and red lipstick; the town doctor is a cokehead whose paths drip oily facetiousness (and is played by Game of Thrones’ Aiden Gillen, aka Littlefinger, with his Littlefin…
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…r those who engage in homosexuality, those who support it, and media that “promotes” or mentions it. A social media campaign using the hashtag #WeNeedToTalk to promote the World Youth Forum being held in Egypt November 4-10 was hijacked by activists to draw attention to the country’s crackdown on LGBT people and on civil society in general: The conference’s organizers had hoped the hashtag would encourage interaction among the participants ahead o…
Read More…try fearing for his life, and who in a history-making speech addressed the United Nations last year about LGBT persecution in Syria, told The Daily Beast that there were possible cultural reasons behind the murder of one young man and the reprieve of his older sexual partner, described as the teen’s “rapist” in some reports. “A tradition in which adult males engaged in sexual pleasure with pre-pubescent boys–ghelman–including hermaphroditic boys,…
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…ns are more actually more likely to be active in politics. They hold voter registration drives and letter-writing campaigns. They also talk more about politics in the pulpit. (They don’t generally make partisan suggestions in worship, though.) What risk is there to the faith of Democratic voters by engaging religion in partisan battle? Is that risk worth it? Second: why, for the love of God or not, are we always talking about building a Religious…
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…he United States, and every bishop in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Kingdom and South Africa has received the offer of a download. Each member of the Council of Cardinals, its secretary, and Pope Francis has received a copy, along with the original Italian-languages essays. If the hierarchy will consider what history really says, perhaps they will think about whether they need to restore the tradition of women as deacons in their own…
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…semi-automatic weapons into automatic weapons without paying the required registration fees. David Koresh became aware of the ATF investigation and invited agents to come to Mount Carmel openly and inspect his weapons. When the undercover agents reported to their superiors that they had seen no evidence of illegal activity, an ATF agent wrote an affidavit to obtain a search warrant in which it was alleged that the Branch Davidians were a “cult” t…
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…dopted the 1997 law “On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations.” Promoted by the Orthodox Church and directed specifically against new religious movements, the law distinguished between the four traditional faiths—Russian Orthodoxy, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism—and non-traditional groups such as Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Latter-Day Saints, and Hare Krishnas. In order to maintain legal status, churches had to prove that they had…
Read More…open letter, written on a blog that bears no names or footprints (the site registration is private), lambasts Vander Plaats not only for his association with Gingrich, but for accepting Gingrich’s help in securing $200,000 in “seed money” for his campaign to oust judges who had ruled in favor of gay marriage. There’s something odd, though, to my eyes, about the phrasing in the Iowans for Christian Leaders in Government materials. Like it wasn’t re…
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