Religion Dispatches
…g that his presence might console a troubled nation. A Culture War Laundry List It is no coincidence that the coming Easter season prompted Sicilia’s impassioned plea for papal solidarity. The poet compares Mexico to the broken body of Christ, beaten, abandoned, and left for dead: “In their name, for this us, for this body, I have come to Rome, Benedict, to ask that in your visit to Mexico you embrace it, before anyone, as the Father embraced the…
Read More…refore now be more restrained, according to Dijkhoff. Sweden: Long waiting list for LGBT retirement home Thomson Reuters Foundation reports that there’s a long waiting list for Regnbagen (rainbow house), the country’s first LGBT retirement home, which opened in 2013. Sweden is ranked as one of Europe’s best countries for LGBT rights, according to an index that ranks European countries based on legal benchmarks for LGBT equality. But many of the re…
Read More…s.” ODAN’s website describes Opus Dei’s aggressive recruitment tactics and lists Opus Dei’s “index of forbidden books,” based on a list maintained by the Vatican until 1948, and which has been updated to tellingly include those by writers such as Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale. (Opus Dei denies that there is an official list of forbidden books, but rather that it maintains a database for members to consult, as it identifies “books…
Read More…every civilization and religious identity was united against the two. In a list of “Future Military Service Medals,” for his new Europe, Breivik describes the “Multi-Cultural Force Medal” that would be awarded “for military cooperation with nationalist Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, and/or atheist forces (non-European) on Hindu, Buddhist or Jewish territory. These efforts must be directed against Jihadi or cultural Marxist forces, personnel or interests…
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…e category of nonbeliever has now been added to the presidential electoral list and I don’t think it will be removed by any future president. This was not new rhetoric for President Obama. He described himself in the book The Audacity of Hope as not having been raised in a religious household. And he also wrote that “we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nat…
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…sm, then affiliated with Jimmy Swaggart. In 2009, he was ordained an evangelist in the predominantly African-American Church of God in Christ. Charles Paul Brown Founder of a group of “immortalists”who believe unlocking one’s unlimited potential can lead to physical immortality, Charles Paul Brown died at 79. According to the organization he helped found, while “the ideas of immortality burned brightly within him, the living of it often eluded him…
Read More…rategy. In the last election cycle, the anti-choice group Susan B. Anthony List targeted Democrats who first held up health care reform by demanding the inclusion of the Stupak Amendment (restricting abortion coverage) but then voted for the final bill. The group ran campaign ads charging the bill was the “biggest expansion of abortion in decades,” a false statement that even got it embroiled in litigation, and caused a group of Cincinnati-area nu…
Read More…e will use this principle to turn his life around. He puts together a long list of wrongs committed and begins the process of correcting for past, harmful behavior. The numerous awards won over four seasons suggest something of the show’s appeal. Earl, an unlikely convert to ethics of reconciliation, stumbles through various attempts to reconcile self-interest and the needs of others. The line between sacred and profane, “right” and “wrong,” is bl…
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…t levels.” This does not answer the question why they are both in the same list. — ed. While Protestant churches like the Presbyterian Church USA have their annual gatherings in the summer, the institutional Roman Catholic Church, with no such meetings to worry about, uses the season to issue documents from on high. According to published reports, the Vatican is soon to release new norms that govern matters of sexual abuse by clergy. (Ho hum—bu…
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…o outside of home nowadays as my name is on the hit list of some fundamentalist groups,” Asif told me. “Our prime minister said that they will arrange some police protection for the bloggers and activists of the Shahbag movement; my name was on that list also. But no one contacted me about it.” The Shahbag movement (named for a political center in the Bangladeshi capital) brought to new intensity longstanding calls for the prosecution of the perpe…
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