Religion Dispatches
…the housing bust. Many people may simply be postponing childbearing until better times return, and a few years of swift growth could produce a miniature baby boom. Good. Here we have actual people making decisions about childbearing, and in the process considering their own economic conditions. He goes on to say that “America has no real family policy to speak of at the moment, and the evidence from countries like Sweden and France suggests that…
Read More…ntegrity of the study. But politically, the integrity of the study may be beside the point. The Witherspoon Foundation and Bradley Foundation apparently wanted a weapon they could use to fight marriage equality and they got it. It’s a safe bet that the Regnerus study will be cited by religious right groups for years to come, the way they have over the past decade cited a horribly flawed study of “ex-gays” by Dr. Robert Spitzer—even after Spitzer a…
Read More…ious institutions such that they aren’t aware of the alternatives that are better aligned with their values. Whatever the reasons, it’s now evident that churches get one chance to get their message on LGBT treatment correct and that they get the message wrong at their own peril. While some celebrate the decline of religious affiliation in America, I think it would be deeply sad for those who wanted a church that delivered on its promises of inclus…
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…my Christian sensibilities, but—although there are significant differences between that situation and the current one—it would never have occurred to me to question a professor.) But the more I mulled it over, the more uncomfortable I became with my own instincts. A main reason for that discomfort is that, it seems clear from the reporting, López Prater is not a Muslim. Were this an intra-Muslim debate, the university would likely have had a harde…
Read More…express obsolete ideology? Or would blogging help the pope realize that some of his teachings are a wee bit outdated? What next, Pope Benedict on Facebook? If so, you can bet your mortgage that plenty of “good” Catholics will be editing their profiles before they ”friend His Holiness.”…
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…Focus on the Family, the champion of family values, somebody that I might bet a hundred bucks is one of the five most influential evangelicals of the 20th century. What is his relationship to Paul Popenoe? Audrey Clare Farley: So Dobson went to work for Popenoe as his assistant, before he founded Focus on the Family in 1979. And so, as his assistant, he authors all kinds of publications, which were basically Popenoe’s ideas for a public audience….
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…this more dangerous than amusing. Sounds like we’re both walking the line between investing these quirky theologies with the humor that they seem to call for, and the sympathy and seriousness that endears them to us in the first place. So long as we upset everyone equally, we should be fine. Something has recently been irking me about the Eden narrative in the Bible that I want to run by you; Adam and Eve don’t actually seem all that upset about…
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…ard, J.J. Goldberg translates the Facebook post of the former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s security service, Yuval Diskin, who says that Israeli “illusions” fueled the current escalation: the rapid deterioration we’re experiencing in the security situation did not come because of the vile murder of Naftali [Fraenkel], Eyal [Yifrah] and Gil-Ad [Shaer] [the three Israeli boys who were kidnapped and murdered], may their memories be blessed. The deterio…
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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…
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…ely deemed blasphemous serves a larger purpose: If others don’t have their freedoms, I won’t have mine. Yes, some of Rushdie’s language was religiously abhorrent to huge numbers of Muslims. But the same freedom of speech that permitted The Satanic Verses made it possible for me to attend a thoughtful, and exceptionally relevant, sermon at my local mosque, here in Cincinnati. The preacher discussed how the Prophet Muhammad clarified that ritual obs…
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