Religion Dispatches
…in crisis. Montreal had virtually bankrupted itself in preparation for the 1976 Games (Athens did so again in 2004). The 1980 Moscow Games were marred by the US-led boycott in protest over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (the current troubles in Georgia offer a chilling parallel). The 1984 Los Angles games were also marred by a Soviet-led boycott, a boycott in which the Chinese dramatically refused to participate. And then came 1988. One of th…
Read More…arrests began, in some cases police visited their homes in the company of a 17-year-old boy, the youngest arrested in the sweep, who they believe was tortured into naming others. Even in a country where the regime has arbitrarily detained — or killed — scores of people, this wave of arrests was unusual. Since seizing power in 1994, Jammeh generally targeted political opponents, not specific minority groups. Also unusual was the fact that forces kn…
Read More…d known for its cultural hostility to gay rights: sub-Saharan Africa. Since 1980, the number of Catholics in Africa has grown by 238 percent. Perhaps more important, 70 percent of them attend Sunday Mass regularly, compared with just 29 percent in the Americas. Some countries with the fastest growth — Uganda, Nigeria and Kenya — have or are considering laws that make homosexual acts punishable by long prison terms or, in some cases, execution. But…
Read More…dicted that 30,000 people would participate in the service, but the actual number appeared to number around 2,000. “Our prayers will open the sky and the homosexuals will fall, we will be blessed with victory,” said Lee Young-hoon, head of the leading organization in the anti-LGBT coalition. Mexico: Supreme Court embraces marriage, Church and some political officials resist As we have been reporting, the marriage equality movement has been movemen…
Read More…ing, and deriding their sexuality. The United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 established that individuals with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted” based on membership of a “particular social group” are entitled to seek asylum abroad. Today, homosexuality is illegal in nearly 80 countries, and at the time of the convention, it was still illegal in Australia, the UK, most of the United States, and most of Europe—in Australia and other form…
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…reating all the chaos. As I boarded my plane for Panama, with a connecting flight departing from, of all places, Houston’s Bush International Airport, visions of interesting frogs and secluded beaches began to recede in my mind as I became fixated on what seemed to be a disturbingly justified question about the citizens of the United States: Are we, um, stupid? When I arrived in Panama, I made my way over to Bocas del Toro, an insanely beautiful a…
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…life in jail.” The theme of alienation is expressed in the song’s focus on flight—from the law, from society, even from friends. And yet we are drawn to identification with an outlaw so alienated from the rest of the world, he believes the Devil is his only friend. In my ministry as an Anglican deacon, leading ministries that offer food, clothing and, most important of all, fellowship to homeless folks living on the streets of Vancouver’s West Sid…
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…m, the question of the day was similar to ones being asked today: Can this flight from the churches be stopped? Chubb feared that these wayfarers on the frontier would “become individualists and isolationists so far as religion is concerned, each ‘going it alone.’” Chubb’s words, so similar to Robert Putnam’s “bowling alone,” resonate clearly today, and they offer a warning to those who bemoan what such high numbers of “nones” means for the future…
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…hecking their watches, making sure that they wouldn’t miss their afternoon flights to Reagan National. Warren, the Goofy, Goateed High School English Teacher Finally, after more than two hours of tracing the path from the bus boycott to “Yes, we can,” it was Warren time. To his credit, Farris introduced Warren by addressing directly the controversies surrounding his stands against same-sex marriage and abortion. He noted that Warren’s stances on p…
Read More…enies that he has either a liberal or a conservative agenda. During his in-flight presser on Tuesday afternoon, he said it was a mistake to interpret him as “left-ish”: It is I who follows the church … my doctrine on all this … on economic imperialism, is that of the social doctrine of the church. While that may be true, the reality is that the social doctrine of the Catholic Church is a left-leaning doctrine that emphasizes communitarianism, disd…
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