Religion Dispatches
…-hand that church attendance and personal values or morality rarely go hand-in-hand. I know many regular church goers who will still turn their back on a neighbor, kick their dogs, cheat on their spouses, and rob their own grandmother blind if it meant they’d profit in some way. As the old saw goes, “Being in church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than being in a garage makes you a car.” I’d rather judge President Obama on Jesus’ standard of…
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…in reality fitting comfortably in the system of religiously organized anti-communist, anti-LGBTQ, and antiabortion politics that has held sway in Brazil for most of the last 60 years. If you’re reading this in the US, pay close attention to what happens as it should offer a glimpse of what’s to come in the 2024 Presidential election. The GOP wants what Bolsonaro and his allies in Brazil already have: a country of people prepared for political vio…
Read More…Faux News. There are more important things to talk about, such as that eye-opening survey on black women’s net worth, and the fact that unemployment in the African-American community is 15.6% across the country. Why can’t the media cover that for a change? Look, black women can marry, unless they want to marry another woman, which they can’t do in most states. I don’t see how this marriage thing is an important story when poverty and hopelessness…
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…pped over. Practicing with and as a group, alone with others, atonement (at-one-ment) implies interaction between the individual and the collective. There are also processes for reconciliation in Buddhism where all parties agree to be present together to enact a peace treaty. Deep wounds can take many years to heal, but just one ray of light in a room that’s been dark for a many years can dispel many years of darkness. The Zen Studies Society’s tr…
Read More…think we have law everywhere else, but this is the slippery slope between freedom to practice religion and freedom from government interference. The past few nights I have gone into this local mosque for the tarawih prayers and come out with out making any human contact. I think this is part of my preparation for hajj: how to perform the ritual requirements without invoking the politics of justice at every juncture. For example, in this mosque th…
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…nal efforts to turn back the clock, Maloney made more concrete in those day-to-day losses women experience in business, law, economics, politics, medicine, gender pay differentials, and, one might well add, religion and academics (including offices of administration). Her point was that progress has ground to a near halt. Women hold less than 18% of the seats in Congress and 25% in the state legislature; women compose less than 3% of the heads of…
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…ality and declared she would boycott Qantas airline “where possible” to protest the company’s support for marriage equality. She also told a Christian radio station that “tennis is full of lesbians.” Navratilova has said that while Court was “an amazing tennis player,” she is also “a racist and a homophobe.” Court charged that money from America was behind the “conspiracy” against her. Myanmar: Prejudice and a bit of progress for LGBT people The M…
Read More…ple) to combat racism, within an underlying logic of “exceptional-democracy-versus-exceptional-racism.” In the work of King at his best, and in many other significant contexts, it has proved its value for anti-racist projects. Could the way that Obama evoked it this morning be another such context? One can hope. Because the exceptionalist discourse and its associated buzzwords (pluralism, democracy, equal rights, multicultural, progress, colorblin…
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…me-checks the fact that “non-Anglo” (read: black) congregations are the fastest-growing segment of the declining denomination, this failure to name and condemn the violent, state-sponsored systems that continue to kill black men, (pregnant) black women, and black children with impunity, is spiritual malpractice. Such a clear statement of condemnation (let alone any action to address the physical and spiritual violence people of color continue to e…
Read More…the first time from strangers on the internet, in venues ranging from anti-Mormon websites to scholarship by respected Mormon historians. Even I have received email from parents who relate that their kids have stopped identifying as Mormon after encountering information about Joseph Smith’s polygamy for the first time on the internet. For many, the sense of betrayal by a trusted institution that appears to be withholding information about its his…
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