Religion Dispatches
…e pages of GQ; and Carl Paladino’s Tea Party-supported run for governor of New York got side tracked by revelations that he had a love child out of wedlock. 2. War Not Peace: America has historically been a war-loving and militaristic country, but this last year’s continued involvement in Afghanistan marked the longest war in the nation’s history. What are the costs? Thousands of American lives lost, trillions of dollars spent, international reput…
Read More…esigner marries during NY Fashion Week The Times of Israel reported on the New York wedding of Israeli fashion designer Idan Cohen to his partner Elad Borenstein during New York Fashion Week. “Homosexuals cannot legally marry their same-sex partners in Israel,” notes the Times. “Civil marriage does not exist in the country, where the solemnization of marriage is entirely controlled by the state rabbinate, and homosexual unions are not in themselve…
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…in that history. The book’s publication has coincided with his arrival in New York, after more than thirty years at Williams College, where he now chairs Columbia University’s Department of Religion. He is attempting to reorganize the department’s faculty around problems, rather than religious traditions or academic disciplines, in order to create a new, dynamic kind of scholarly community that can be responsive to pressing questions as they aris…
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…journalist Masha Gessen published “Why Autocrats Fear LGBT Rights” in the New York Review of Books. She says viewing Trump’s sudden order banning transgender people form the military as a distraction is “not only a grievous insult to transgender people but a basic failure to understand the emotional logic of Trumpism.” Trump got elected on the promise of a return to an imaginary past—a time we don’t remember because it never actually was, but one…
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…him. When he began the Clergy Consultation Service in 1967—the group of 21 New York clergy who referred women for abortions when it was still illegal in every state—he arranged for the clergy involved to attend a demonstration that could teach them what an abortion procedure entailed and what a woman experiences in an abortion. The clergy met with a pathologist who explained the procedure using a life-size model of a woman. The doctor explained ca…
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…and religious resonance: The Guiding Light, The Brighter Day, One Life to Live, Another World, As the World Turns, A World Apart, Days of Our Lives. Yet also from early on the soap had a frivolous, ridiculous aesthetic reputation at best, and was considered an outright poisonous influence at worst. During the Second World War, at least one psychiatrist worried that radio soaps were undermining the war morale, distracting women with addictive stor…
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…in such a way that it now signifies a commitment to the creationist narrative over and against the evolutionist narrative. Thus one finds the ichthys symbol inscribed with the word “truth,” as well as other modifications, including designs that show the Darwin fish eating the Jesus fish and vice versa….
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…ter has now come to an end, and that Quebeckers have rejected its divisive politics. In the words of Bernard Drainville, the principal architect of Bill 60, on the day after the election, “It’s over, the Charter. We did what we could to get there. Unfortunately, things ended rather abruptly.” However, a longer view of the debate surrounding Bill 60, and of the social factors that fueled this debacle, suggest that the Charter’s underlying politic…
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…ng me backwards.” I had moved to North Carolina almost a year before, from New York, in order to get my PhD in religion at UNC Chapel Hill. A good Northeastern liberal, I’d read the warning articles in The New Republic before I went, and I knew the Tea Party had taken over the state, but I could not have imagined something like the “bathroom bill,” or HB2. When I sat in Bell’s audience in Durham in March, the fallout from the state’s recent anti-L…
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…will be the 10th anniversary of the conservative Anglican manifesto, the Jerusalem Declaration, and the third GAFCON conference. According to a GAFCON communique: We are excited to announce that the new chairman of the Primates’ Council is the Most Rev. Nicholas Okoh, Primate of the Anglican Church of All Nigeria. He is joined in leadership by the new vice-chair, the Most Rev. Stanley Ntagali, Primate of the Anglican Church of Uganda. Archbishops…
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