Religion Dispatches
…onse. In this, only the secular way of death fully honors the dead, where “better place” platitudes betray him. Thomas’ paradoxically titled “Refusal to Mourn” is in fact the refusal to mitigate grief, to paper over the universe’s forever-loss of singular person in guaze-promises of eternity: “I shall not murder/The mankind of her going with a grave truth.” Yes, dying may be harder for the atheist. But what I cannot understand, and reject totall…
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…from them. Hence the need for a book like Jones’: the truth can’t set you free until you know what the truth is, and the truth is that white American Christians suck at racial equality. It’s a decent hypothesis and response, but simply knowing better rarely solves issues as complex as white supremacy. Social problems are, well, social, and require us to take into account broader patterns and movements. In this instance, it’s worth looking at anot…
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…an affirmatively anti-LGBT-rights position and intervene to make religious-freedom or free-speech arguments on behalf of the defendants in LGBT discrimination cases brought under state laws. Which brings us to the final and overarching point of how to agitate for equality in Trump’s America: Get to Your Statehouses Even before Trump’s unlikely electoral victory, each new legislative session brought a cornucopia of anti-LGBT bills introduced in sta…
Read More…y, museum, and shop, The Wooster Group has also struggled with the tension between a somewhat Spartan existence and the temptations of commerce—Willem Dafoe, founding company member, left the group, and his relationship with Liz LeCompte, supposedly lured by Hollywood fame. Meanwhile, The Wooster Group recently attracted bona fide movie star Frances McDormand to join their ranks, as an “associate.” Four women (McDormand, LeCompte, Suzzy Roche, and…
Read More…ed into the legislative history of each of these laws, I think it’s a fair bet that when they were passed the religious exemptions were intended to protect a very small percentage of the population with religious objections to vaccination, like Christian Scientists or some parts of the Amish community. It’s unlikely that the exemptions were intended to be used by the growing number of well-educated and well-off parents whose version of a “natural”…
Read MoreWhat better way to rescue a floundering Republican primary campaign than to tap the adopter of the term “Christocrat” to lead your effort? Newt Gingrich has selected former Senator Zell Miller to be the co-chair of his presidential campaign. Miller, a Democrat, infamously spoke to the 2004 Republican National Convention and charged that John Kerry would arm the military with spitballs. But that’s not Miller’s only claim to fame. Earlier in 2004,…
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…unctioning autonomously from male authority, even in the process of finding a mate. Girls are to rely on their fathers to do this for them and remain in submission to their fathers until they have been given over to submit to their husbands. These organizations all promote literature, lectures, conferences, and other materials intended to promote this perspective, as well as the starkly delineated gender norms and expectations upon which this view…
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…ng their intelligence. Also, one may say that negative theology is content-free and useless because it nullifies the use of rational thought. In a sense this is a valid argument. But one can go beyond negative theology while bearing in mind its lessons. In fact, negative theology constitutes the central nervous system, if you will, of the entire Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas that Dawkins so happily and ignorantly mocks. In this work, Thomas e…
Read More…going to allow religious objectors to completely opt-out of laws by continually re-defining the burden on their religious exercise, regardless of the impact on third parties and the harms done to them. And you can bet if that strategy succeeds here, we’ll see it in use very soon in other contexts, like exemptions to LGBT non-discrimination laws and marriage equality protections. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that….
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…to what Donnie McClurkin said in his video response to the actions of the promoters disinviting him to sing? McClurkin said in a Socialcam video that “It is unfortunate that in today that a black man, a black artist is uninvited to a civil rights movement, depicting the love, the unity, the peace, the tolerance….” He goes on to say that: “…Discrimination, bullying is still a part of this…its bullying, it’s discrimination, it’s intolerance and it…
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