Religion Dispatches
…problem. As my student discussing his “real” self and Dorothy Nelkin and Susan Lindee in The DNA Mystique effectively demonstrate, in our culture DNA knowledge is a different kind of knowledge with a different, almost religious, kind of power. Much heavier in some ways than, say, the results of a pregnancy test. That guy in the daytime TV talk show, who gets down on his knees with unrestrained happiness and relief after the DNA test tells him he’…
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…missionaries, to as many as 3,000 students a year. This semester, more than 800 students are registered in Professor Bott’s classes. (Eleven are registered for BYU’s African-American history course this semester.) Professors at BYU routinely find themselves having to address racist and sexist content taught in Bott’s classes, and many are outraged and embarrassed by his rogue remarks to the Washington Post, say sources at the university. “Dr. Bott…
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…embly, the sisters officially called for gun control legislation and signed 800 postcards demanding Congress members to pass immigration reform. As LCWR past-president, Sr. Pat Farrell said to the Assembly, “Expressing what we really think and feel, with transparency and vulnerability, is for the brave of heart. It is, however, what we are being asked to do in our current conflict. All of a sudden the world is looking to us.” Like this story? You…
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…ed on March 9 with a front-page story in USA Today. For the last week, his phone ringing off the hook, Kosmin has become a lightning-rod for anxiety about the decline of American religiosity. “Whoever doesn’t win the election is going to complain about voting fraud,” he says with a chuckle. In its first two days online, the ARIS’ 26-page summary report [pdf], authored by Kosmin and his Trinity College colleague Ariela Keysar, scored 40,000 downloa…
Read More…bsite from which he claimed to get his information. He pulled out his cell phone: “Freddie!” he said to an unseen interlocutor. “Will you find me what that website for the saucer, the prophecy, for tomorrow night – the 14th?” He paused, then yelled: “THE SAUCER! All I want is access to the information so I can give it to someone else.” He then recited the web address of a YouTube video. It was my own searches, however, that turned up Goodchild’s w…
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…America First Works are both partnering with Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, which claims to have relationships with 2500 churches across the country that are promoting “an America First agenda.” In any case, it has emerged as a pivotal organization on the Christian and political Right, reportedly employing 450 people. Its Turning Point Faith division seeks to organize conservative Christians around the 2024 election. (Sean Feucht’s ‘unfriendin…
Read More…s right in front of us, difference is on our iPads, in our laptops, in our phones. We hold a whole world of difference every time we open a phone. And the response to in the world around is at best insult, and so often violence, a reality which is the living experience of many you here. Welby also addressed a January gathering of Primates, which voted to suspend the Episcopal Church from questions on doctrine or policy for three years because of i…
Read More…e, it will lead to the killing of Christians in Africa. Speaking on an LBC phone in, Justin Welby said he had stood by a mass grave in Nigeria of 330 Christians who had been massacred by neighbours who had justified the atrocity by saying: “If we leave a Christian community here we will all be made to become homosexual and so we will kill all the Christians.” “I have stood by gravesides in Africa of a group of Christians who had been attacked beca…
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…tic to oppose LGBT equality, as Salon explains. Just three years ago, on a phone call with faith leaders supporting the Tea Party movement, Price agreed that there are “consequences of activity that has been seen as outside the norm,” suggesting that increased health care costs for LGBT people are a result of some abnormal activity. (Yes, that’s code for anal sex. Or gender-affirming surgeries. Or marrying the person you love most in the world, if…
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…ign as head coach after discovering he’d been using his school-issued cell phone to call an escort service. Freeze was hired the following year by Liberty University, where he coached until he left for Auburn, just weeks after the announcement that his contract had been extended through 2030. Just this summer, Freeze contacted a former Liberty student, one of among 20 who’d taken legal action against Liberty for failing to pursue their sexual assa…
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