Religion Dispatches
…nation.” I’ve spoken to board member Don McLeroy quite a few times on the phone and he genuinely seems like someone who wants to be understood and have people appreciate what he’s doing. (I’ve never met or spoken to Cynthia Dunbar, but she strikes me as someone who really doesn’t care what people think of her.) So, I feel like calling up McLeroy and saying, “You, sir, are a cheater!” Because from the perspective of the literal-minded (and fundame…
Read More…tors are caught in the middle, and the voters themselves are… well… making phone calls and holding marches, because what else is there to do? (When I called the office of one member of the Public Health Committee to register my opposition to SB-1433, the staffer on the phone said, “Goodness, it seems like everyone in Oklahoma is calling.” I wearily replied that most of the calls must be in support of the bill, right? “Oh, no,” she said. “Against i…
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…, speculating, and damn, those kids are all doing x, y, and z on their cellphones, and it’s an outrage! Pew’s study of cellphone etiquette gives us one way to begin digging into a much larger set of questions: which norms do we, and should we, place around the use of digital tools? When are these opinions just personal preferences, and when do they take on a more explicit ethical dimension? When should we enforce them? Part of the problem is that…
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…s pretty much it. Evangelical leaders themselves didn’t believe the Gallup numbers were right, and [they thought that] the best way to combat those Gallup numbers was to ask Gallup to do another survey. And so in 1978, Christianity Today, a leading periodical for evangelicals, paid Gallup to do a big survey and in addition to just asking the born-again question, they asked questions about belief in the Bible, belief in Jesus, and intent on convert…
Read More…e religious right. While opponents to Prop. 8 have filled the streets of a number of cities with thousands of angry and steadfast demonstrators, religious right groups appear see the anti-same-sex marriage amendments that passed in California, Arizona, and Florida as a much-needed culture wars booster shot. With pro-gay civil rights demonstrations continue across America, pro- and anti-gay spokespersons squaring off in debates on radio and televis…
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…anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more famil…
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Despite an American Idol judging gig, a baby girl with Orlando Bloom on the way, and her new album Smile due out August 28th, Katy Perry hasn’t been capturing the public’s attention like she did with 2010’s Teenage Dream. Back then, songs from “Firework” to “E.T.” dominated the airwaves, and she reached the still unsurpassed height of tying Michael Jackson’s Bad for most chart-topping singles off of one album. And yet, separate from the ebb and f…
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…mic fundamentalist who slaughtered forty-nine people at a gay nightclub in Orlando in 2016. Many conservative Christians have believed that liberals’ campaigns for sexual rights would bring about God’s wrath. AIDS “may be a judgment of God on the nation,” Billy Graham proclaimed as gay men and other marginalized persons fought for their lives during the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s. Jerry Falwell concurred and added that homosexuality was “Sata…
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…utions has to do with her experience after the PULSE nightclub shooting in Orlando. Aly became very involved with the Trust Collective, an interfaith coalition trying to build partnerships between faith communities and the LGBTQ community. When she first became involved, there was some interest from others in the Muslim community. “The last meeting I went to,” Aly said, “I was the only mainstream type of Muslim there. I come from your usual mosque…
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So here we are again, after Newtown, after San Bernadino and Orlando. This time the rampage is in Las Vegas, with more dead, more people hospitalized, more deep trauma inflicted, but with the same shitty debate over prayer-vs-action and same despair over the potential for action being recycled. There are some differences, of course. Rather than the NRA paying $3 million to elect a senator from Iowa, we now have a president elected with $30 millio…
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