Religion Dispatches
…portant. When he goes to Uganda, he’s not known as Scott Lively, but as an American evangelical. When Warren goes to Kenya, he’s not Warren, but an American evangelical. As long as they have a church title and stand for conservative politics, they have influence. The Africans don’t always have the resources to follow their statements so they say: this man of God says this is going on in the world. Or Scott Lively goes to the Uganda Anti-gay Confer…
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…ugh for us to talk honestly about socially regressive attitudes within the American Muslim community? The reality is that homophobia in the American Muslim community very likely played a causal role in producing Omar Mateen’s hate crime. It certainly wasn’t the only source of homophobic bigotry influencing him, but it was one such source, and that is reason enough for American Muslims to resist the anti-gay sentiment in their mosques and community…
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…or the LGBT community in Jamaica: some claim that homosexuality is a North American import, and thus not part of Jamaican tradition and culture. However, American evangelical churches play a strong role in importing and exacerbating homophobia in Jamaica. Lewis explained that since the 1970s, American evangelical churches have become entrenched in Jamaican society and are no longer viewed as outsiders. In contrast, advocacy on behalf of the human…
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…selyn Cook’s premise in The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family. Through carefully researched individual narratives, Cook tells the story of people who got into QAnon and then rejected—or were rejected by—family members, and the grief and damage that ensues from these domestic ruptures. The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family Jesselyn Cook Crown July 23, 2024 It’s hard going to read compounding…
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…communities—save for the Reconstructionists—identified Jewishness through one’s mother and not the father. I will focus on the substantial political and religious literature during this decade that stresses the “fracturing” and “polarization” of American life. The patrilineal decision decentered American Judaism, causing rifts within the various movements and shifting the center of concern from the United States to Israel. So far, I have delivere…
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…the test will effectively marginalize important ways of teaching about the American past, and force American high schools to teach U.S. history from a perspective that selfconsciously seeks to de-center American history and subordinate it to a global and heavily social-scientific perspective. De-center American history? Heaven forfend! Subordinate our glorious saga to a “global and social-scientific perspective”? Never! National Review’s Stan…
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…ership of Mormon Church president Brigham Young, the ordination of African-American men ceased, African-American men and women were prohibited from temple worship, and intermarriage was officially discouraged. Some historians believe that Young’s about-face on the status of African Americans may have been motivated by embarrassment stemming from an 1847 scandal involving an excommunicated African-American Mormon named William McCary, or by politic…
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…oft-quoted statement about gay priests—“Who am I to judge?”—occurred on a flight back to Italy from Brazil. Most recently in Tblisi, Georgia, the pope referred to the “theory of gender” as a “great enemy to marriage today.” He added that “there is a global war to destroy marriage,” and that the weapons being used are a form of “idealogical colonization.” In the past, Francis has used that phrase to describe Western ideas being forced onto develop…
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…aft accusations did not involve carnal relations with the Devil, nocturnal flight, or being able to fall down stairs without sustaining injury. Though they imputed magical evildoing, the accusations mostly involved more mundane human problems, like suspicion, resentment, and festering doubt. This characteristic aligns with what anthropologists and historians who work on comparative witchcraft have made clear: that while witch fears can take quite…
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…sion of a religion, here are 7 more: 1) Hirsi Ali describes the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim advocacy group which has opposed her work, as “an organization subsequently blacklisted as a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates.” Exactly. 2) “Muslims … use cell phones and computers without necessarily seeing a conflict between their religious faith and the rationalist, secular mindset that made modern technology…
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