Religion Dispatches
…hington, D.C.-based operation had $1,690,914 in revenue in 2007. Americans United points out on its website that there are a number of other important religious right organizations to be aware of, including Gary Bauer’s American Values, Rick Scarborough’s Vision America, and Lou Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition. An expanded version of the Church & State story is available here. ++++++++++ New Coalition takes on Christian Zionism Before the e…
Read More…ool zones. Do you know where most of the mass murders have occurred in the United States? In gun-free zones. There’s an exception or two but typically it’s where the bad guy has reason to think he’ll have a monopoly of force. It has to be one of the most stupid laws on the books, and yet we’ve had so much inertia because we don’t want guns around children especially when the bad guy is the only who has one. It defies logic, but then being a libera…
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…he OCA, the Synod of Bishops have the authority to restrict their right to free academic speech and thought. Academic freedom, which was arguably founded in Medieval Christianity, has always been subject to institutional affiliation. But the OCA document doesn’t specify who might be at risk. Does it pertain to OCA lay members employed at institutions and/or writing academic articles for publications unaffiliated with the OCA? There is (or at least…
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…o removing transgender identity from its global list of mental disorders.” United Methodist Church: Schism ahead? Claude Summers explores the possibility of a global schism in the United Methodist Church over the issue of acceptance and ordination of LGBT people. An excerpt: The denomination has been debating the issue for 50 years and has reached no consensus, in part because conservatives have blocked every attempt to forge a compromise. While A…
Read More…e largely law-abiding, exercising their Constitutional rights to religious freedom and freedom of speech, the group’s criticism of American racism and imperialism struck many ordinary Americans as politically radical and thus dangerous. The globe’s most powerful symbol of resistance to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was the Nation of Islam’s most famous member, boxer Muhammad Ali. In 1967, Ali refused induction in the U.S. armed forces to pro…
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…isted childbirth has found a home in the fundamentalist communities of the United States and Australia. Part of the reason for this shared enthusiasm across continents is due to the popularity of the Quiverfull-friendly teachings of Nancy Campbell, editor of the conservative Christian women’s magazine Above Rubies, which has a large readership in all three countries Campbell has lived: New Zealand, Australia, and now the United States. While Campb…
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…ns that the parents of Shivy, an 18-year-old transgender man living in the United States tricked him into visiting India on a holiday, took his passport and green card, and tried to forcibly marry him to a man. He says he fears for the safety of transgender activists who sheltered him after he ran away from his home; he said men posing as police officers showed up at the activists’ home. He has asked the Delhi High Court to help him get his passpo…
Read More…in Christ” internationally, with “the greatest single threat to religious freedo m in the United States”: same-sex marriage. Religious liberty, he suggests, is in danger of being “lost in America.” Other members of the drafting committee include: Os Guinness, an evangelical drafter of the Williamsburg Charter (an influential antecedent of the current project); Jacqueline Rivers, co-founder and executive director of the Witherspoon-sponsored Seymo…
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…inistration. Since the early 1990s, a sector of the political right in the United States has embraced a specific set of conspiracy theories revolving around government plans to impose tyranny through the United Nations or some such international body. These conspiracy theorists, egged on by groups like the John Birch Society, claimed that George H.W. Bush was planning a New World Order before attacking the Clinton administration for political assa…
Read More…is increasing its (as the report likes to say) “market share” of the total number of abortions performed in the United States. If you were hoping to then see a careful accounting of why other variables do not explain this phenomenon—income factors that may have made low-cost clinics more appealing, or the number of abortion clinics in the U.S. and how that has changed over the time period in question, or the possibility that people in private prac…
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