Religion Dispatches
…alled,” in Mormon parlance) to serve as a leader in an LDS congregation in San Francisco.” All of these changes have been made because LGBT people were faithful to an institution that has historically despised and rejected them. Progress comes from making changes within, not protesting outside the doors. I completely understand the mindset of those who would question my membership in a club where many of its members wish to eliminate me altogether…
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…nd to set a new kind of conversation in motion. When we met last month in San Francisco, I began our conversation by commenting on the scope of the book. Buruma, best known for his expertise on Japan, told me he’d written partly to contest the idea that religion doesn’t matter in the political life of East Asia. “It’s a different kind of religion,” he explained, “the idea of spiritual authority still plays a big role.” And, while it operates more…
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…legation, Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts. It was an American delegate to the San Francisco conference, Barnard College dean Virginia Gildersleeve, who modified Smuts’ text and thereby “singlehandedly [introduced] the allusion to “the dignity and worth of the human person,” Moyn writes. Actually, as Moyn himself blogged after visiting the Gildersleeve papers at Columbia, the New Zealand delegation may have been the first to suggest the addition of “t…
Read More…to change.” Those are the words Ryan Kendall uttered in a federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday as the trial over whether or not to overturn Proposition 8 that stripped gays and lesbians of their right to marry in California, got into its second week. Kendall took the stand to recount his harsh treatment in an “ex-gay ministry.” His deeply religious parents forced him into so-called “reparative therapy” after finding a note that Kendall had…
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…thirties, he finally settled down as an actor, writer, and producer in the San Francisco theater scene. It was there that Talen met Sidney Lanier, an Episcopal minister whose own antics were dramatized in the play-turned-film The Night of the Iguana, by his cousin, Tennessee Williams. At the time, remembers Lanier, he was “mostly traveling in the opposite direction from the Church.” After seeing Talen perform, Lanier took him out to lunch and said…
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…be shown at a church in Detroit shortly after the canonization, and in San Francisco thereafter.) Today, there are institutions organized to address AIDS/HIV that are named after the Belgian missionary, including Damien Ministries. Indeed, Damien Ministries is celebrating its 20th year of caring for persons with AIDS/HIV. And, what some claim to be the world’s only Roman Catholic chapel memorializing persons who have died from HIV/AIDS, at Montrea…
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…learning, and culture and also of geography at Texas A&M University; Jesus Francisco de la Teja, professor and chairman of the history department at Texas State University-San Marcos; and Lybeth Hodges, professor of history and government at Texas Woman’s University, all provide the panel with solid mainstream advanced academic credentials and educational experience. In their expert reviews, Kracht, de la Teja, and Hodges offer reasonable suggesti…
Read More…ise Keepers experienced an extraordinary growth spurt, drawing tens of thousands of men to rallies in football stadiums and sports arenas across the country. As attendance at its rallies grew—278,000 in 1994, 738,000 in 1995 and more than a million in 1996—so did its revenues. In 1997, more than one million men gathered on the National Mall in Washington for “Stand in the Gap.” Not long after “Stand in the Gap,” however, the organization hit hard…
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…esbians and gay men are allowed to tie the knot on the courthouse steps in San Francisco. The real issues are the authority of the Bible and the nature of revelation. Recent polls show that while roughly two-thirds of Americans believe that Noah’s flood, the creation story and other biblical events are literally true, only about 40 percent of those surveyed accept the Bible as completely inerrant—a figure declining at about the rate that public ac…
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…s of the media and the entertainment industry.” And she warned the city of San Francisco, “overwhelm[ed]” by “the weight of sin,” that it would be “brought to your knees.” With their headquarters now in Jerusalem, God TV liberally draws on the trend in both the Word of Faith and apostolic and prophetic movements of “getting back to your Jewish roots.” The increasing embrace of Hebraic Christianity is often described as a desire to grasp the theolo…
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