Religion Dispatches
…s” of children to be abused. According to a New York Times editorial, “The United Nations panel went to the heart of the matter in rejecting the church officials’ claims that they were responsible for enforcing the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child only within the geographical limits of Vatican City and not globally through their power over the Roman Catholic diocesan hierarchy.” Church officials and their conservative allies ar…
Read More…ese decisions granted such status to an LGBT group for the first time. The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission finally prevailed in its three-year effort to obtain the status, a sign “of the shrinking influence of American social conservatives at the United Nations.” Congressional conservatives Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Christopher Smith (R-NJ) — heroes of the religious right — had joined with Muslim countries in an effort to block…
Read More…er party’s platform following criticism from prominent Protestant leaders. United Kingdom: Young, Gay, British and Muslim; New Queering Islam Blog Layla Haidrani writes this week for Vice about the experience of young gay Muslims in the United Kingdom. Most of the 11 self-identifying LGBTQ Muslims I interviewed for this piece are like Maryam: confident that they are able to reconcile their faith and sexuality and increasingly opting to live their…
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…and examine—is there racial bias in these policies? Stop and frisk in the United States. Mass incarceration in the United States, where race is really the factor. I’m trying to argue the same thing, that targeting Muslims as terrorists in this country has been really problematic, rather than looking to the root causes that underly terrorism. The scary thing is we don’t know what the trajectory could be for Muslims. Before 9/11, the idea that ther…
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…at CPAC’s April 2022 conference in Dallas, religious conservatives in the United States wildly embraced him as the prophetic herald of a post-Enlightenment model of a spiritually-pure cultural polity. “What I see in Orbán,” raved conservative Christian columnist, Rod Dreher, “is one of the few major politicians in the West who seems to understand the importance of Christianity, and the importance of culture, and who is willing to defend these thi…
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…ed in Ukrainian flag bumper stickers, locally organized rallies around the United States, celebrity fundraisers, social media organizing, and the auctioning of NFTs. Such displays make no obvious attempt to remedy the disproportionately difficult barriers faced by Black and brown refugees from Ukraine or any other country. Where was this sense of international responsibility toward refugees from Syria who’ve similarly suffered from Russian warmong…
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…ates but that has been ramping up again in recent years, and that even has international reach. For help contextualizing the Poolaw case, RD reached out to Michele Goodwin, a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California-Irvine and founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy. The author of Policing The Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood, Goodwin told RD, “Britney Poolaw’s conviction…
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…rector of the Reconciling Ministries Network within the 8.5-million-member United Methodist Church, brought his group on board early. “Over 500 United Methodist justice activists who gathered recently in Colorado chanted ‘believe out loud’ in unison as we launched a new fifty-region national organizing campaign tied to this theme,” Plummer reports. Rev. Michael Adee, whose More Light Presbyterians are also working hard to advance significant polic…
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…at they can turn their trial into what they perceive to be a referendum on United States defense strategy.” That motion was denied, as typically happens. Even when the defendants are prevented from speaking about necessity and international law, though, in being arrested and tried the activists identify themselves with the figure of the prosecuted and persecuted Christ who is at the heart of their theology. The Performance of Nonbelonging The tria…
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…tian, and modern ideas about the nature of God, the nature of the Self, and the nature of the human body. 10. Yoga “UN-Bound” In his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 27, 2014, Narendra Modi called for June 21 to serve as International Yoga Day. Nearly two hundred countries, including the United States, Canada, and China, expressed their support for the proposition, and, on December 11, 2014, the General Assembly app…
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