Religion Dispatches
…ble assertion to make in such a tendentious book. Perhaps there is a small number of Americans losing their lives at the hands of hasty harvesters; even a very small number would be too high. But I had a hard time summoning any outrage. In the end I learned much more from Kagan—ironically because his aims are in a way more modest. He wants to convince you of his physicalist stance; however, he doesn’t want to tell you how to reconcile with death….
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…tation is wrong. Bulgaria: Pride activists, protected by police, vastly outnumber far-right protesters The leader of the neo-Nazi National Resistance planned a counter-protest to Saturday’s Pride march; last week he urged people to bring “brooms and shovels with wooden handles” to “cleanse Sofia from garbage.” Human Rights Watch has some history: Sofia Pride marchers have faced hateful rhetoric and violence in the past, and only tepid police prote…
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…y. Many were rounded up and taken away, or summarily executed. The Nuba, a number of peoples who populate the Nuba Mountains, were being hunted and killed. Aerial bombing campaigns were carried out. Tens of thousands fled. Reports trickling out of Kadugli, the provincial capital, describe it as a “ghost town.” Armed men searched in vain for Andudu (who goes by his first name). But his church—the diocesan cathedral, a small brick structure, very hu…
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…de against Albanian Kosovars in the late 1990s. The fact is, a significant number of Serbs, and even a large number of others from traditionally Orthodox backgrounds, continue to harbor a great deal of anger about Western intervention in the Kosovo War, which they see as a failure by the West to comprehend the historical role-reversal that’s taken place, including the persecution of Orthodox Christians by Albanians and other majority-Muslim ethnic…
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…them and for everyone around them. The good news here is that significant numbers of the hesitant and resistant respond to faith-based approaches. And although PRRI estimates that about 13% of all Americans are “generally agreeable to QAnon theories,” those same people respond the best to those approaches. The study names six such techniques: A religious leader encouraging vaccine acceptance A religious leader getting a vaccine Religious communit…
Read More…e open to anyone who wishes to attend, though there will be a limit on the number of schools (no more than ten in the next decade) and the number of students enrolled. Opponents see charter schools as quasi-privatized schools (and also fear that this is a first step toward further privatization). They see even these limited charter schools as a threat to funding for public education—especially in these difficult budget years where public education…
Read MoreThere are reportedly a record number of openly lesbian, gay, and bisexual athletes competing in this year’s Olympics, which the Washington Blade’s Michael Lavers wrote are getting under way “against the backdrop of rampant anti-LGBT violence.” According to news reports, out lesbian soccer players have endured homophobic taunts during matches at the Rio Olympics, although USA Today reported that “there were signs of acceptance during the opening c…
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…USA might adopt this rhetoric to affirm the position of its fairly sizable number of dissenting presbyteries, but is it really accurate? The word “tradition” tends to connote a sense of fixity and stability, an impression that “this is the way marriage always was,” leaving “gay marriage” to represent a sharp and dramatic historical rupture. Yet this way of thinking is only possible because of a certain historical amnesia. In fact, it would be far…
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…trospective Rundowns who had very traumatic experiences. There have been a number of cases in which people have died under mysterious circumstances in Clearwater, Florida, [the center of Scientology in the U.S.], but nothing as traumatic as what Lisa went through. That was truly unique because it happened in Church headquarters. What I would say is that some of the Scientology processes have a destabilizing effect on some people. And certain peop…
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…you to write this book? I had been doing a rethink on this question for a number of years and my convictions had changed but I didn’t know how to process it in the congregation at that stage. I had processed it with the church board and pastoral staff and different leaders. I was doing a lectio divina when I got the idea to write a letter to my congregation. I didn’t want to have congregational meetings to talk about how to handle this because th…
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