Religion Dispatches
…and other visitors—from entering the country as a response to last week’s California shootings. He went on to defend this egregious statement on Good Morning America by comparing his plan as similar to FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. This statement and the crowds of Trump supporters cheering for him have finally struck a chord in the US public sphere. The other candidates have called him out with House Speaker Paul Rya…
Read More…n’t know. She knows that the continents are neighbored. “Beijing’s smog is California’s drought and people of color are closer to the hole on the sinking ship.” Whether she is arguing for municipalizing energy or rebuilding the story of humanity, she is arguing matters religious and politically, simultaneously, without mentioning God. What if we keep God in it while leaving God out of it? Or stick with the second part of the golden rule and leave…
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…Fully to appreciate what I am saying, know that here in Riverside County, California, I am writing close in time and space to the shootings in San Bernardino. I have been driven to distraction and anger by the way the word “terrorism” is kicked about. For example: mass shootings by a white Christian, “crazy, unexplainable,” but, mass shootings by a Muslim, “terrorism,” without question. As it happens, Linker writes as if there is something like “…
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…first began teaching yoga to prisoners at the San Quentin State Prison, a California prison for men. According to the Prison Yoga Project, most prisoners suffer from “original pain,” pain caused by chronic trauma experienced early in life. The consequent suffering leads to violence and thus more suffering in a vicious cycle that can last a lifetime. Yoga, according to the Prison Yoga Project, provides prisoners with a path toward healing and reco…
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…ica’s Favorite Holidays: Candid Histories Bruce David Forbes University of California Press October 27, 2015 Over time, however, some Puritan colonies began to celebrate an annual thanksgiving in late November or early December, a belated harvest celebration or really an early winter observance. Some ministers opposed the annual fall event but it became popular nevertheless, eventually seen as a New England tradition. Oversimplified, the major act…
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…ted States where he is pursuing a neurobiology course at the University of California. The Delhi High Court has asked his parents and state police to respond to the allegations. Bermuda: Government plans public ‘info sessions’ on marriage equality The Ministry of Community, Culture and Sports announced that public information sessions on marriage equality will be held on September 28 and October 1 in response to a pro-marriage-equality petition pr…
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…rch at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at University of Southern California, and Sikivu Hutchinson, atheist scholar and author. _______________ Peter Laarman: Kaya and those whom she interviews cite a range of aspects of traditional religious life that clearly repel younger people and help fuel the unaffiliated phenomenon. On the one hand, they all cite what we might call a set of interrelated “definitional” problems: hierarchy, patriarc…
Read More…ven at the height of church involvement in the passage of Proposition 8 in California, I never seriously considered removing my name. It just didn’t matter that much to me. Spiritually and emotionally, I left the church I grew up in decades ago. And despite being a “known gay activist” to the church, I was never excommunicated, so my name remained on the church rolls as a member. Not anymore. On Thursday (Nov. 5), it was revealed that the church i…
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…with author Sikivu Hutchinson on the campus of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she’s currently a visiting scholar at the USC Center for Feminist Research. We talked about the founding of the People’s Temple, why so many African-Americans decided to follow Jim Jones, the “ultimate white savior,” until the bitter, unspeakable end, and what reverberations the tragedy holds for black religiosity today. This is not only Hut…
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…ound. Maybe that just makes us human. Alan, you supported Proposition 8 in California, but you say in the book that, in the end, the victory of Prop 8 made you a proponent of marriage equality. How so? [We were] sitting there that night as all politically interested people were, watching the results come in, and on the left side of the screen are the gays in the ballroom and on the right were all of these people who I knew. Some of these people ar…
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