Religion Dispatches
…gation in Ferguson was not just the result of individual decisions (“white flight”), but also of carefully engineered federal policies intended to prevent white and black people from living in the same places. Aghapour wants us to get better at blaming institutions. When confronted with thorny social situations, he suggests that we first “scale up,” meaning that we situate individual actions within a broader institutional context. Second, he sugge…
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…f evangelical-minded men. The budget dropped from a peak of $117 million in 1997 to about $34 million in 2001. Gone were the stadium rallies, replaced by much smaller arena events. There was a grandiose plan to extend the success of the DC rally through millennial marches to all 50 state capitals, but that plan faltered big-time. PK limped along, largely unfocused. In 2003, Coach Mac stepped down, a major blow to an organization built largely on h…
Read More…mination against adolescent girls, ethnic and religious minorities, street children, hijab, early and forced marriage and other forms of discrimination. Greenland: Same-Sex Couples Can Marry on April 1 The final legislative hurdles to marriage equality legislation were cleared this week and same-sex couples will be able to marry on April 1, reports The Perchy Bird. …
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…ol, to be shut out in the dark, to drift, to face the abyss with no armor. Flight is an utterly human response to mystery. But sometimes the need for control, absolutes, and knowledge careens out of control. To wit: Those who desire to have creationism taught in our nation’s public schools. They know, because the Bible says so; and what’s more, they know so well that they’re going to take control of the educations not only of their own children, b…
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…the light comes again. We’re going to be okay, I think. But I’m still going to call the ACLU and give them my congregants’ exact flight information. Just in case….
Read More…nd power of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Paprocki said. “Be uprooted and put to flight from the Church of God from souls created in the image of God and redeemed by the precious blood of the divine lamb. “Dare no more, oh cunning serpent, to deceive the human race, to persecute the church of God, to shake the chosen of God and sift them like wheat,” he continued. In an unusual use of public services, the exorcism included two armed Springfield police o…
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…y discharging pregnant women. That policy ended with Crawford v. Cushman, a 1976 US Appeals Court case ruling that the discharge rule violated due process. The result of the ban is that active-duty servicewomen and military dependents are faced with a number of equally unappealing options: venture out to local hospitals while overseas, to medical facilities that may have different standards of care, where medical workers may not speak English, or…
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…ty, Evolution, and Power Donovan O. Schaefer Duke University Press November 13, 2015 The way that affect theory functions, on the other hand, more closely resembles macroeconomics, which shows how small things like individual economic choices aggregate into giant dynamic forces, which then loop back and shape individual experiences. Except the currency of affect theory is emotion, which scholars have broken up into much smaller elements like backg…
Read More…ancy Pelosi’s numbers have being going down a chute faster than a Jet Blue flight attendant” and “President Obama’s idea of a rogue state is Arizona.” As for the substance of Romney’s speech, what was most notable was the absence of talk about values, let alone religion. Instead, Romney sounded every bit the corporate buyout and turnaround specialist, criticizing the “anti-growth,” “anti-investment” Obama administration for forgetting the priv…
Read More…ing, and deriding their sexuality. The United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 established that individuals with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted” based on membership of a “particular social group” are entitled to seek asylum abroad. Today, homosexuality is illegal in nearly 80 countries, and at the time of the convention, it was still illegal in Australia, the UK, most of the United States, and most of Europe—in Australia and other form…
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