Religion Dispatches
…r party presidential candidate. But I’ll bet you a twelve pack of caffeine-free Diet Coke and a dozen pink-frosted sugar cookies that there is no anti-Mormon phonebanking script in use by Catholics for Obama. Anywhere. Is anti-Mormonism real? Yes. But even if one poorly-trained rogue phonebanker veered off script into an anti-Mormon ad lib, it does not make for a concerted anti-Mormon effort. (Leave that to orthographically challenged “Heaven is…
Read More…e. (Although I do expect our supplies will run out in about 48 hours because we’re the types that feed the neighbors.) Mitt Romney, this tropical storm is in your wheelhouse. I bet your pragmatic mind is spinning through all the logistics. 72 hour kits for everyone! You can do this!…
Read More…morning, “It’s hard to reason with an idiot.” Or maybe, it’s just hard to use worldly logic on someone who is divinely inspired. But Ed Kilgore really gets inside Akin’s thinking: Very few if any of the people calling for him to step down supported his very recent primary candidacy; most either backed someone else or hoped he’d lose as the weakest of the potential Republican candidates. He represents a very self-conscious hard-core Christian Righ…
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…ppeals to what governor Scott Walker called “evil”. Americans could indeed use a primer on most world traditions. But what I wonder is how a desire for empathy might square up against the dichotomized language of “evil.” As Amardeep Singh eloquently argues, the hatred directed towards Sikhs might connect to a visceral reaction to embodied religious otherness. How do we move from promoting basic facts to combatting that profane shudder of hatred? T…
Read More…earch editor Wright, the University of Texas has launched its own investigation into the integrity of the study. But politically, the integrity of the study may be beside the point. The Witherspoon Foundation and Bradley Foundation apparently wanted a weapon they could use to fight marriage equality and they got it. It’s a safe bet that the Regnerus study will be cited by religious right groups for years to come, the way they have over the past de…
Read More…mination against a group, then strips it of its language of liberation because the struggle is not the same, down to every last detail, is incomprehensible—and reprehensible. If a group—or class—of people is being blatantly discriminated against not just by churches, but by federal and state governments, and said group, or class, decides to rebel against that discrimination and claim its rightful place as full, tax-paying citizens of the United St…
Read More…: “Amen! I didn’t used to think so but I do now.” We’ve seen Cameron speak out against homosexuality and embrace the far right agenda by speaking at CPAC, but and it remains to be seen if he’ll embrace the rest of the “biblical worldview” promoted by Vision Forum and Christian Reconstruction: biblical patriarchy, eliminating public education, and any public assistance for the poor, etc. In any case I’ll bet that Monumental will be a contender for…
Read More…ted a church that delivered on its promises of inclusion, tolerance, and love and were failed so profoundly by churches in the stranglehold of homophobic rhetoric and abuse. Young people are repulsed by it. And if this atheist had to venture a guess, I bet that Jesus would be too….
Read More…ly Hindu, that women in Hinduism are subordinate to men, and that Hinduism promoted social inequality and injustice. In the absence of any theological perspectives, Marxist/Ambedkarist interpretations of Hinduism did have an impact on Western understandings, including those of noted religion scholars such as Doniger and Paul Courtright. This isn’t to say that Marxist approaches to religion can’t be useful, but it’s important to understand the cont…
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… It seemed just possible that some of you made more money than I did because you deserved to. You made more money because you had more talent and did more work. Of course, there remained the question of how much more deserving you were, of whether either of us, a freelance scribbler or a Wall Street investor, deserved to occupy a whole other financial galaxy than the attendant who took care of our ailing parents, or the farmer who produced our m…
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