Religion Dispatches
…altered—apart from adopting the marketing techniques of pop culture evangelists and making synagogue music a little peppier. His epiphanies are generally of the Chicken Soup for the Soul variety: “I’m coming to realize that people of faith come in all shapes and sizes,” he writes, after spending a day in the company of Prince Rahm, of the Atlanta-based Black Hebrews. While it is certainly fascinating, and perhaps admirable, that we have come to a…
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…those things, but I didn’t,” says Birge. “I was very naïve. I should have listened to my instincts, but instead I listened to other people, and trusted this man’s judgment, because he had the stamp of approval from the church.” Hernandez (who declined several offers to comment for this story) offered to drive Birge to a nearby Wendy’s to talk, but instead he drove to a dark part of town, where he parked, lowered Birge’s seat and climbed on top of…
Read More…d) will be free to focus on the crucial matter of the latest Dan “Da Vinci Code” Brown adaptation. As of this writing, we are still waiting for advance word on the subject of Obama’s graduation speech. As any professor can tell you, a college commencement address frequently falls into one of three genres. The first strives to inspire with insipid platitudes equal to the occasion. (“Your graduation is a change I can believe in.”) The second ignores…
Read More…cher; nephew of H.V. Sheshadri, the former general secretary of the nationalist paramilitary R.S.S.; Modi’s long-term spiritual advisor; and chairman of the committee for the International Day of Yoga—spoke about yoga’s power to make homosexuality disappear. Yet, despite all of the bluster and campaigning, when the same Supreme Court agreed this year to reconsider Section 377 in response to a petition claiming it violated LGBTQ Indians’ rights to…
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…inated response” to the piece: “Nominee clams up, PoP cleans up and Fed[eralist] Society attacks.” Both responses are obviously designed to prevent the kind of rigorous questioning of a judicial nominee’s religious worldview that’s even more necessary in the post-Hobby Lobby world. The idea that a nominee’s (or a candidate’s) religion can never be questioned is a throwback to the infamous attack on John F. Kennedy by a group calling itself the Nat…
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…using on the last week of the earthly life of Jesus Christ, Christians are listening to horrific accounts of priestly sexual abuse of children and wondering whether Pope Benedict XVI will take decisive action to cleanse the Church. Probably he will not. After more than half a century of living and working in an all-male club he just doesn’t get it. His focus has been purity of doctrine, not the purity of those who say Mass and administer the Churc…
Read More…ance at an interfaith gathering. During one of several faith panels, journalist Steven Waldman declared, “Catholics and evangelicals agree with Barack Obama on 80 percent of issues, but the thing that’s holding them up is they think he’s an extremist on abortion.” Sojourners president Jim Wallis took to the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal to ask whether Democrats could count votes, and insisting they had to move to the right on abortion or l…
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…tin has allowed authorities in Muslim-majority Chechnya to impose a strict code based on their interpretation of Islam. Official attitudes toward homosexuality are reflected in the government’s response to the story: A spokesman for Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, denied the report in a statement to Interfax on Saturday, calling the article “absolute lies and disinformation.” “You cannot arrest or repress people who just don’t exist in the repu…
Read More…cigarette and a beer (both forbidden according to the LDS Church’s dietary code, “The Word of Wisdom”), more substantial coverage this week is focusing on Romney’s service as bishop of his LDS congregation in Belmont, Massachusetts in the 1980s. On Monday, the Washington Post offered a revealing account of Bishop Romney’s interactions with Boston’s robust Mormon feminist community during tense years for the movement, when the LDS Church played a…
Read More…ated into criminalizing such styles, coming uncomfortably close to a dress code. Many of those against the bill are worried that it threatens national unity; though Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim country, it has significant minorities from other religions who feel that this bill is pushing a definition of pornography under the guise of “Islamicizing” the entire nation or riding roughshod over Indonesia’s secular pluralism. There are…
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