Religion Dispatches
…e to time. I won’t miss much. I won’t miss the horrible cable news, or the sanctimonious preachers, or the respectability blacks who wish we’d all just get out of the streets and stop protesting. I won’t miss the well-meaning white people who try to commiserate, but won’t have a substantive conversation, or commit to fighting for justice and equality for brown and black people. I won’t miss the large majority of the Asian American community that r…
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…s new analysis of employer health benefits plans? Kaiser found in fact that 10 percent of nonprofits with more than 1,000 employees have requested an accommodation to the contraceptive mandate, as did five percent of firms with between 200 and 999 employees. According to Kaiser, “many of the nonprofits who have sought the accommodation are likely health systems or educational institutions affiliated with the Catholic Church, which objects to birth…
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…ademics, defending Times and Seasons, By Common Consent, and other doctrine-focused blogs, complained that the Bloggernacle had been co-opted, while Mormon mommy bloggers (women who write primarily about home life and children) and lifestyle bloggers retorted that they are marginalized by the academics, despite having blogs that rank among the most popular on the Web. It was a Bloggergate. “I get so irritated by the dismissive, uninformed male blo…
Read More…Freedom from Religion Foundation this week on behalf of students from Soddy-Daisy High School, Scales sent an e-mail to all local principals on Tuesday, saying the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled prayer before football games and graduation ceremonies to be unconstitutional and that the practices should be stopped. “But things are handled a little differently in different areas of the country,” Scales said. “This does not need to be something that div…
Read More…of Christian. Best Christian Workplaces Institute (BCWI) surveyed more than 11,800 employees in 124 organizations “to identify great workplaces with a Christian mission and/or values.” The surveys ostensibly asked about such things as “job satisfaction, organizational commitment, Christian witness, supervisory effectiveness, work satisfaction, personal growth and development, management effectiveness, customer/supporter satisfaction, teamwork, com…
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…re he graduated from another Southern Baptist college in Missouri, and a 22-year-old aspiring minister from Philadelphia who quotes Proverbs, declares his love for God—and laments the recent breakup of his relationship with a boyfriend. They are all members or supporters of Soulforce, an organization that aims to change the hearts of those who use religion to justify discrimination against sexual minorities. Most of the 20-somethings in the crowd…
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…for sale in LDS bookstores and on the shelves of LDS homes. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, when questioned about the ban in public, LDS Church leaders continued to sidestep its origins and rationale. Mormons hungry for a more direct approach welcomed LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley’s 2006 address, “The Need for Greater Kindness,” as a long-awaited denunciation of racism: “Racial strife still lifts its ugly head. I am advised that even ri…
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…selling like hotcakes. According to the Web site, complete with the iconic 1-800 number and attractive female operator with headset, the IDENTIGENE test is “Fast. Accurate. Confidential.” It’s not the speed, accuracy, nor confidentiality that worry me so much (although plenty of problems lurk therein). It’s more the information itself, its power, and in what context it is received. Personally, I’m not too interested in the test for myself. I know…
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…ents an illustrative extreme—the reductio ad absurdum of America’s politics-as-entertainment culture, and the extraordinary fulfillment of all the ways that faith, apocalypticism, and the politics of fear can combine to help someone raise cash. Bakker has always had a nose for spectacle. In 1977, he started the PTL Satellite Network, making him one of the first religious leaders to recognize the potential of satellite TV. Then, using his fame and…
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…s. All those mundane moments that enable us to better situate ourselves vis-à-vis this thing out there called religion. Taylor does not appreciate the Leviathanism that is the most apt description of the world we are currently living in. This is the secular age with its endless horizon of pixels and pundits and calls to liberation and fullness and health to which we all inevitably race to bow down. To be clear, such Leviathanism does not merely si…
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