Religion Dispatches
…ight Americans is poor. One child in six is poor. … From 2000 to 2007, the number of children living in poverty increased by 15 percent… In 2007, the richest 20 percent of Americans had over 50 percent of the nation’s income, while the poorest 20 percent had only 3.4 percent.” In a piece titled “Fighting Poverty With Faith,” Steeland and Nordengren recently reported that “the ‘Fighting Poverty with Faith’ action campaign [in September] brought tog…
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…peddled by the Catholic Bishops and their supporters. Nettina claimed the number of abortions increase with greater access to contraceptives, a trope commonly used to assert that contraception fails and therefore does not decrease the number of unintended pregnancies. This claim echoes statements made by the Bishops themselves, as well as anti-contraception groups, that birth control doesn’t work and is harmful to women’s health. Hagen recommende…
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…any Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of Quantum Mechanics, which Hugh Everett posited in the late 1950s. The next versions to come around were the “new” and “chaotic” inflationary scenarios in the 1980s, and the most recent has been the “landscape” of string theory, which emerged in the early 2000s. Since then, a host of rival multiverse scenarios have emerged, as well. In each case, the proponents have been ridiculed and dismissed, but with diminishin…
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…the world’s natural resources to drive around town, and turn on an obscene number of lights. Doesn’t this offend your morality? Or do you truly have no shame? PC: Riz gets to play all kinds of roles. I just play fat Indian guys. In fact, for my part in the Lowe’s ad, I was given food to eat between takes. The Christmas lights in the commercial were all LED, so: you’re welcome, Environment. Can I use plastic bags again now? RM: I was forced to take…
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…nent in most people; temporary, in others. But getting saved was a rite of spiritual and moral passage for all. Inoculation with the goodness of Christ, however, didn’t have any effect with some folks. When I consider my moralistic take on life, I can’t say it didn’t work at least somewhat in my case. But I’m still a sucker for the cross of gaud. Given that Mrs Roach has long ago departed with the angel band, I can confess to having stood around i…
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…the Earth.” The cracker barrel-styled reading of Acts—and of I Corinthians 13 at the prayer meeting the week before where 150 people reportedly swarmed his house—are emblematic of Pastor Ted’s uncanny, Zelig-like talent for reflecting the emerging Christian Right zeitgeist of the moment. In the mid-1980s, the so-called Charismatic and Pentecostal “shift in gravity” from the Deep South westward had much less to do with a random vision to build a c…
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…and, for ours, that was an impossibly beautiful Tuesday morning. September 11 put an end to the long 1990s when, as it is nearly inconceivable to imagine today, the biggest problem in our post-Communist, unipolar world seemed to be Monica Lewinsky. I had long planned to become a corporate lawyer. Two years later, I enrolled in law school only to leave within months. There were many reasons why, but among them was this: I could no longer go down t…
Read More…refused to do so, and Catholics for Marriage Equality was born out of that spirit of resistance. They have 1000 members already. Together, we are organizing joint calling days the last Tuesday of each month to bring together Catholics, evangelicals, and Mormons for marriage equality. Sara Long: We are also organizing Mormon delegations to march in Pride parades in Seattle and Portland. SH: And we’ll be ready to counter misinformation about marriag…
Read More…n Paul II, Pope Benedict sent the following text message to Italian mobile phone users: “Let us go forth in the joy of the risen Lord and trusting in his permanent help.” JPII had been texting Italians with a “thought of the day” while he was still alive, so Benedict was simply carrying on this tradition. Pope Benedict has more recently used text messaging to communicate with attendees throughout this year’s World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia. H…
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…ormons Building Bridges delegation offered an opening prayer through a megaphone. Then, the LDS contingent took its assigned place at the head of the parade and began to march. Some Bridges marchers worried how the crowds would react, especially given the history of LDS Church-backed opposition to same-sex marriage. “But when we turned the first corner onto 200 South Street, the crowd just roared,” says Austin Hollinbaugh, a recent BYU graduate fr…
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