Religion Dispatches
…ghts or protections from the law because their marriages are illegal under Western laws. Muslim polygynous marriages differ from the FLDS community’s in that there are a finite number of wives allowed and Muslim communities are not separated from Western society through the use of compounds, as FLDS communities sometimes are. However, both of these communities can find themselves trapped by the law if they no longer want to be a part of the polyga…
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…an ally in the new Patriarch. In a recent interview, Kirill criticized the Western interpretation of human rights that allows for what he sees as immoral behavior. “Movements are emerging that support the right to homosexual marriage, drug use, prostitution, and euthanasia. We cannot allow for democracy in our society to be measured by such criteria,” he said. In recent years, Orthodox groups have fought against public displays of homosexuality in…
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…t to the tenets of natural history, creationism retained the upper hand in Western thought until the mid-1800s. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection transformed the terms of this debate by supplying a materialistic account of how species evolve. Every offspring differs from its parents and siblings, Darwin argued. With limited resources, only the fittest of these offspring survive to propagate their variations. In this manner,…
Read More…ombard us today in our increasingly polarized times. A recent episode from Western political life was for me especially reminiscent of the uglier side of the debates of Luther’s time. A Swedish newspaper published a political cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad worthy of the vile anti-Semitic tracts that have blighted Christian-Jewish relations for centuries. Not so long ago, Jews were routinely portrayed in popular European culture as bizarre semi-hu…
Read More…bill: “I apologize that this took place and that my stated purpose of not promoting the Bill was compromised. I take responsibility for what was done on the stage of TheCall, even in my absence.” He also claimed that he met with unspecified Christian leaders in Uganda and “that not” one “was carrying even an ounce of hatred for homosexuals.” Not one ounce? James Nsaba Buturo, Uganda’s Minister for Ethics and Integrity, was a speaker at Engle’s ra…
Read More…gion and Democracy is crying foul and accusing the Bishop of trying to get Western countries to use their influence in Africa to help accomplish the “acceptance of homosexuality in Africa.” The IRD, bankrolled by conservative funders like the reclusive Howard Ahmanson, has, since the early 1980s, made it its mission to cause splits and dissension in Protestant denominations. According to Jim Naughton of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, who con…
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…surprise. Mexico has long been a place of violence, death and dying in the Western imagination. From Hernan Cortez’s horror at the bodies of sacrificial victims (a horror that blinded the conquistadors to their own acts of violence), to the famed sixteenth-century friar Bartolomé de las Casas’ account of Spanish atrocities worked upon innocent indigenous bodies in the process of conquest, to the accrued corpses of populations laid waste by Europea…
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…n to a pithy saying of Jesus) must be a Bible-smuggler who, in the name of Western hegemony, is determined to smother all exotic cultures, especially Islam, with civilizing Christianity. In fact, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and most Protestant, including evangelical, mission is defined today by a servant model. Modern Christians express their discipleship through medical, educational, agricultural service to those who need it, because they see the f…
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…92) and the Wallace Global Fund. A third important shift will occur as the Western nations figure out if they can work together, at all, within a Trump presidency. President Sarkozy may indeed put a carbon tariff on American imports. The EU will surely wonder if we are going to play a role either for peace in Syria or for the refugees. There will likely not be a unified Western position. President Angela Merkel’s decision to run for a fourth term…
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…actions—transcendence, blood, moral judgment, shame—in which we live. (We “Western selves,” that is, whether we’re atheists or monks.) The religious, in this sense, is a framework for consciousness, the vocabulary we are given and out of which we think. Writing in a frantic, jagged zig-zap rhythm, reminiscent most of hip-hop in the ricochet play of off-rhymes and fast-ripped allusions, Krieger plumbs the visceral heart of Christian tradition—the b…
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