Religion Dispatches
…reating serious backlash among BYU students and faculty. Since then, Honor Code enforcement has been conducted through referrals—even third party referrals—of suspect students to a campus Honor Code office, a system of enforcement that has created significant opportunities for abuse. (When I was a BYU student, it was possible to make an anonymous third-party referral.) Honor Code enforcement on campus has been used to bait and target gays and libe…
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…en pursue in their edited volume, Conspiracy/Theory (Duke University Press, 2024). Their book engages the tensions and counterintuitive affinities between these two forms of worldmaking—theorized through the analytical framework of “conspiracy/theory”—across 17 diverse case studies. The Public Eye, Spring 2024 (Issue 109) examines the far-right expansion of authoritarianism globally. Inform your resistance: Subscribe now! PRA sat down with Wedeen…
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…her these remarks would prevent him from supporting the former president in 2024. Like Turner, minority whip John Thune, the second most powerful Republican in the Senate, said “of course I disagree with that,” regarding Trump’s comments. But he too refused to say whether he would support Trump in 2024 or not: “It’s just one of those intuitively obvious things, whether a candidate for office has sort of a bedrock principle, ‘are you going to suppo…
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…try, not to mention the recently adopted apocalyptic refrain that marks the 2024 campaign. To open with an escalatory rally like this presumably sets the tone for his campaign going forward. That last aspect, the apocalyptic refrain, deserves some attention, because it ramps the calls for violence up to the next level, announcing Trump 2024 as an eschatologically driven campaign that requires the destruction of opponents. Indeed, as one of the ope…
Read More…xual Behaviours.” Theravada is the prominent form of Buddhism practiced in Cambodia. At least 96 percent of Cambodians practice Buddhism. The Pali Canon does not specifically prohibit homosexuality. Buddhist teachings are relatively free of misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. The steps of the Eightfold Path to enlightenment speak about sexual activity. The second step states, “You must renounce all pleasures of the senses.” This is thought to re…
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…illegally self-muster on Trump’s behalf if the Democratic nominee wins the 2024 election. Even barring this worst-case scenario, militias are a different force to be reckoned with today than they were 30 years ago. By vacillating between guerilla and paramilitary postures, or anti- and pro-state stances, militias have become empowered as independent forces to be reckoned with by opponents and supporters alike. A racial justice protest in nearby L…
Read More…to act as if he did not believe. Yet his understanding of the relationship between belief and practice suggests something about how we have come to think of religion in the marketplace approach of contemporary spirituality. Bell treats atheism as a religious practice in which one attends services and reads devotional literature, the “sacred texts” of atheism, as he calls them. The conclusion he hopes for is just what Pascal thought was impossible,…
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…e, fidelity, equality, and Justice.” Precept fifteen declares that the KTM promote democratic freedoms: expression, conscience, and religion. Precept sixteen states that Knights need to understand “how others get close to God.” Credo sixteen extols the virtue of patriotism. Number nineteen advises humility and nobility, while twenty-two announces that no woman should fear a Knight, but, rather, should feel protected by him. Twenty-nine reiterates…
Read More…cocious choice’ of his sexuality, an apparent reference to homosexuality.” Cambodia: LGBT magazine debuts NCB News’s Kristi Eaton reported from Phnom Penh this week on Q Cambodia, a print magazine directed at LGBT people and their allies, the first in “a country known for its abysmal human rights record and gender inequality.” The story says that the country’s main cities can be friendly for gay tourists, but that life is difficult for LGBT Cambod…
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…llywood Censored. The code they designed became the Motion Picture Conduct Code, popularly know as the Hays Code after it was adopted by William Hays, a Presbyterian elder who was hired by the major studios to help clean up the industry’s image after it was rocked by a series of scandals. The code, says Black, “was a fascinating combination of Catholic theology, conservative politics and pop psychology—an amalgam that would control the content of…
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