Religion Dispatches
…ference. Mormon women travelled from as far away as New York, Florida, and Germany to take part in the collective action organized by the group Ordain Women as a gentle and symbolic demonstration against pervasive gender segregation in LDS Church administration and leadership. All observant men and boys over the age of 12 are eligible for ordination to the Mormon lay priesthood, and the Church’s theological, liturgical, financial, and administrati…
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…rdain Women effort. Julia Murphy, who flew in from her home in Heidelberg, Germany, said, “I know it’s a long way. It’s worth it!” Heather Olson Beal of Nacogdoches, Texas, said, “This wasn’t easy for me to do. I’ve lived with a lot of fear and I can’t say publicly a lot of the things I feel about gender inequality in the church. This is a way to say it.” “I hope that the leaders of the church would see that we are ready to contribute more,” s…
Read More…was especially curious about its reception – whether it would effectively promote dark green spirituality and resistance to environmental practices and policies that degrade environmental systems. So I was especially interested in the reception to the film among ordinary people around the world and issued a call for papers analyzing the film’s reception. I was also interested in the reception of the film by my scholarly colleagues. I expected, in…
Read More…ssion” or even “tolerance” for LGBT people. They want a government that will give it carte blanche to abuse, torture and even kill LGBT people. In short, they want a government, much like the one in Germany in the 1930s (as actor Stephen Fry so eloquently elucidates), that will give them the right to finally solve “the homosexual problem.” For the children, of course….
Read More…he country” and has said, “There is a parallel between what we saw in Nazi Germany and what we are seeing today in Burma.” Punks in Yangon are speaking out against the monk-led genocide to international media. The outsider subculture contrasts with the Buddhist Burmese majority, whose strong reverence for monks discourages openly opposing them. Punks’ response also contrasts sharply with that of dissident-turned-party-leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who…
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…sm and antisemitism. There is, of course, no direct line from Paul to Nazi Germany. Nirenberg is not making a “deterministic” argument, “that the long history of thinking with and about ‘Jewish questions’ inevitably led to or caused the ‘Final Solution.’” But what then is the relationship between anti-Judaism and genocide? According to Nirenberg, “the Holocaust was inconceivable and is unexplainable without that deep history of thought.” But is t…
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…that failing to go out to vote for Romney would be like being a pastor in Germany in the 1930s and failing to try to stop the Holocaust. Meanwhile, Charisma magazine appears to be the Grand Central Station of election prophecy. On its pages, publisher Stephen Strang has posted his Romney endorsement, along with some dire warnings by other “prophetic” voices, like Franklin Graham, who warned: “This could be America’s last call to repentance and fa…
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…nd Counter-Reformation. Or the fact that in 1589, Stubbe Peeter of Bedpur, Germany, confessed (under torture and threat of imminent execution) to being the serial rapist of his own sister and daughter, a child murderer, a cannibal, and a werewolf who had sold his soul in a sort of Satanic contract. This was widely reported in all the new-print European tabloids of the day. And then there’s the fact that the Brothers Grimm were not the original sou…
Read More…ity but also the US Senate, President Obama, the governments of Canada and Germany, and, most recently, Bob Costas in shouting a collective, outraged “WTF” at the International Olympic Committee for refusing to hold a minute of silence in memory of the eleven Israeli athletes murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics forty years ago. I have yet to hear any rationale for the IOC’s intransigence on this point. Whatever one thinks of Israel, Palestine, an…
Read More…d as a “crucial example” for anybody? They had enough problems in interwar Germany. But Reitter’s goal, thankfully, is not to resurrect these idiosyncratic notions of Jewish self-hatred. Instead he wants to correct misconceptions about “terminological differences.” His arguments are convincing; however, while the book is short, readable, and enlightening, it is a work of scholarship—Reitter assumes that the reader is familiar with the previous wor…
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