Religion Dispatches
…we find an investment advisor named Sean Hyman pushing “The Biblical Money Code,” which claims that advice “woven” into Scripture has helped him go from earning $15,000 to giving away up to $50,000 a year. Unlike Hovind, Hyman is giving away his system for free. All you have to do is sit through an hour-long video, during which Hyman explains how “to unlock vast amounts of wealth safely and ethically.” Fancy explanations are provided, but it’s act…
Read More
…e of social and community values in pictures.” For the next 38 years, that code shaped Hollywood’s output. The Production Code insisted that movies were primarily “to be regarded as entertainment” that would “improve the race.” As such, movies should avoid explicit images that would be upsetting or play to “the lower and base element.” Those images included graphic violence, “excessive passion,” “white-slavery,” “scenes of actual child birth,” and…
Read More
…y,” were deported: Local police chief Lazaro Mambosasa said they had been “promoting homosexuality”. “Tanzanian law forbids this act between people of the same sex, it is a violation of our country’s laws,” said Mambosasa. Just days later an NGO, the Community Health Education Services and Advocacy (CHESA) centre, was suspended on the same charge and accused of organising a workshop at the Peacock hotel. CHESA and ISLA insisted they were merely co…
Read More…rnment claims that the legislation will strengthen the NGOs’ work and help better promote the services they offer. It would do so by creating NGO monitoring offices at the district, regional, and national levels. That framework would also ensure that all rules and regulations set up by the bill are enforced…. Critics rebuke the bill as a rejection of the work that NGOs do in Uganda—to better the livelihood of its people, especially the underprivil…
Read More
…convincing was this product launch, complete with Facebook ad campaign and promotional website including a promo video that went viral, that a number of customers were disappointed and angry to find out that it was a fake. Part of the confusion seems to have been that the launch occurred on March 28, not the customary April 1. But just as important was consumer demand. Enough people were convinced by the slick product rollout that they actually wa…
Read More…mer athletes of color who had a positive experience with BYU and the Honor Code: “If Darron Smith wasn’t so hell bent on exposing BYU, the Church and the honor code office as racists, he’d find out that for every Thomas Stancil, Tico Pringle and Ray Hudson, there’s a Brandon Davies, Reno Mahe and Brian McDonald, the latter of which recovered from an alcohol-related probation, joined the Church and served a mission to Washington, DC.” Sikahema’s fu…
Read More
…ke Russia’s anti-gay propaganda law, a major step backward: Consensual sex between men was a crime in Soviet times but Kyrgyzstan, an impoverished country of 5.5 million, adopted a new criminal code in 1998 that made it legal. Kazakhstan and Tajikistan have also taken similar steps but the two other ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, have not. Kyrgyzstan would, however, be the first of them to ban “gay propaganda” am…
Read More
…segregation as the original reason for their opposition to abortion, their bet that it would be the winner strategy has not been a secret. According to Randall Balmer’s account of a Religious Right conference in 1990: Weyrich tried to make a point …Let’s remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision… what got us going as a political movement was … the IRS [decision] to rescind the tax-…
Read More
…d it as a noun, as the Greek and Latin translations did, then you take the bet as a preposition, “in,” and you get a simple declarative sentence familiar from the King James Version translation: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Full stop. What follows, “And the earth was without form, and void,” then describes the unformed, chaotic (tohu vabohu) earth that God just created from nothing. Taken this way, then, we imagine an a…
Read More
…at each stage it introduces a twist. In the Barnabas, for instance, Judas’ betrayal of Jesus to the Romans prompts God to save Jesus by removing him to heaven and to condemn Judas by changing his face so that it was the betrayer who suffered arrest and indignity: Judas entered impetuously before all into the chamber whence Jesus had been taken up. And the disciples were sleeping. Whereupon the wonderful God acted wonderfully, insomuch that Judas w…
Read More