Religion Dispatches
…gation in Ferguson was not just the result of individual decisions (“white flight”), but also of carefully engineered federal policies intended to prevent white and black people from living in the same places. Aghapour wants us to get better at blaming institutions. When confronted with thorny social situations, he suggests that we first “scale up,” meaning that we situate individual actions within a broader institutional context. Second, he sugge…
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…Justice Department has made for Ferguson and which it has also made for a number of other cities around the country, are important. But the problems they’re addressing are a symptom. It’s not to say the symptom shouldn’t be treated, but the underlying cause of these problems is the fact that we’ve segregated housing throughout metropolitan areas in the country for the last century. And unless we are as aggressive in desegregating neighborhoods as…
Read More…this month that Mexico’s evangelical party, Encuentro Social, had bought a flight to Mexico City for a Colombian lawmaker active in recent protests against Colombia’s education minister, who is a lesbian. (Hernandez did respond to messages from BuzzFeed News.) The report also said activists were coming from Peru and Panama. A tiny group of people responded to NOM’s call for a solidarity protest at the Mexican embassy in Washington, D.C. Hazteoir.o…
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…s and cultures—it’s not easy, after all, to cultivate a reputation for top-flight scholarship while simultaneously signaling common cause with evolution-denying right-wing conservatism. Given the emptiness of Wheaton’s theological censure of Dr. Hawkins, it seems even more unlikely that Wheaton’s move to fire Dr. Hawkins is a principled defense of evangelical orthodoxy. In fact, it seems fair to presume that the optics of this situation are delibe…
Read More…l suggests that it was not to be. If there’s another chapter left in American Christianity, it will likely require an embrace rather than a flight from the absurdity of its words and practices….
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…mistreated women, to children forced to work. –In yet another impromptu in-flight press conference, Pope Francis said in June that Christians should apologize to gay people and others the church has mistreated. Today, children are taught this at school: that everyone can choose their own sex. And why do they teach this? Because the books come from those people and institutions who give money. –In a meeting with Polish bishops on World Youth Day, F…
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…ogically, in particular to African Americans. King’s tweet referenced the “Flight into Egypt” (Matthew 2:13) when the holy family were called to flee to Egypt to avoid the “massacre of the innocents” by King Herod. This scriptural reference has served as a prooftext that Jesus and his family were going to hide amongst “Black” people in Africa away from the fury of an infanticidal despot, hence King’s emphasis on “EGYPT” not Denmark (Europe). King…
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…gned amidst the allegations, along with Auxiliary Bishop Lee Piché. On the flight back to Rome, Pope Francis was asked why he felt the need to offer consolation to the Bishops over the sexual abuse scandal in America. Clarifying his comments, he said that his words of comfort were not meant to downplay the situation but that “It was so bad I imagine you cried hard.” He also reiterated “those who covered this up are guilty. Even bishops who covered…
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…district is significantly whiter than Georgia at large, or the role white flight played in building suburban Atlanta and its politics. Nor does he mention the interesting and probably more salient fact that wealthy, highly-educated suburban districts like this one or WI-05, which includes most of Waukesha County, form motivated, partisan counterweights to Democrats’ urban turf. (To be fair, that might be changing.) Williams doesn’t even manage to…
Read More…op band in the UK.” In the media coverage that has followed the Pulse nightclub shootings, many news consumers are seeing queer Muslims for the first time. That invisibility is largely a consequence of the risks that coming out entails for queer people in any conservative religious tradition. But well before events in Orlando put their community in the spotlight, artists and activists like Choudhury-Potter have been creating spaces where LGBT Musl…
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