Religion Dispatches
…Husain Abdullah was penalized for praying after a pick6…. Smh pic.twitter.com/G2j7plEawE — NBA RETWEET (@RTNBA) September 30, 2014 UPDATE: This is revealing: a 2012 slideshow from Bleacher Report, “Tim Tebow and the 10 Most Religious Players in NFL History,” cites only Christian players, even though Abdullah had played in the league since 2008 and was known to observe the Ramadan fast even while playing football. “I’m putting nothing before God,…
Read More…entertainment license. An attorney for the dancers told GSN: This decision comes at an important time in Hong Kong – not only for Hong Kong citizens seeking to exercise their right to demonstrate, but also for LGBT members of the community wishing to express their views free from police harassment. ‘Our highest court has now sent the police a clear message that they can no longer use this piece of public entertainment legislation to restrict the r…
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…oaning at a bad joke. Many of the verses have been paraphrased to maximize comedic potential so that “Jesus had disappeared in the crowd” in the Bible becomes “Houdini Jesus” on its card. Double entendres abound and there are swear words. Lots of them. This a strange mix of sincerity and sarcasm prompts the question: at what, exactly, are players supposed to laugh? PLAYERS AGES 8+ looking for interactive fun at the expense of organized religion…
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…ligned with liberal values than Evangelicals.” But these numbers shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has bothered to looked at Catholic opinion polling for the past 30 years. The fact is, on most hot-button, sex-related issues, Catholic opinion has long been about the same as public opinion, and mainstream Protestant opinion, as a whole and significantly more liberal than Evangelical opinion. The turning point for Catholic opinion catching…
Read More…nique Department of Secular Studies, and author of, among others, the forthcoming book, Living the Secular Life. Zuckerman told me he found the data “sort of bizarre” and that it “runs counter to all that I know on the topic.” In the upcoming book, Zuckerman notes that while there is a paucity of research on secular parenting, there are longitudinal studies on the future impact of a secular childhood on adult religiosity are out there, and they sh…
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…ers have filed a single law suit against the mandate and have accepted the compromise accommodation the administration presented. We ignore the fact that, in response to a demand by the Phoenix Arizona bishop that a local Catholic hospital and then Catholic Health Care West, a large regional system sign an agreement that they would never again perform a specific type of life saving abortion, both refused and both left the Catholic Health System ra…
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…dely debunked weeks ago, and yet it persists. Hovering at #2 on the Snopes.com “Hot 100” list of the most-circulated hoaxes, this one takes the form of a Facebook post by CEO Mark Zuckerberg (and, ahem, spells his name incorrectly). Seen it on your feed lately? It states that Facebook is instituting a “No Religion” policy, whereby “anyone spreading religious beliefs” will have their account shut down and be subject to “investigation.” Because what…
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…y meet is a self-proclaimed expert in religion. What should we make of one commenter’s remark on the Aslan video: “Religion scholar. . . isn’t that an oxymoron?” This presumes that expertise in one’s own religion—or one’s own rejection of it—is earned without pursuing degrees. According to this view, academic training only pushes the budding scholar farther away from “real” Christianity, as Green calls it. And as Aslan found out, the scholar’s “o…
Read More…ropaganda law.” In a story about the new constitutional amendment push, RT.com reminds us, “In 2013 President Vladimir Putin compared same-sex partnership to Satanism in a public speech and blasted it as “a direct course to degradation and simplification, to the deep demographic and moral crisis.” Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina: LGBT Life on Europe’s ‘Frontier’ Liam Hoare at Slate examines the precarious lives of LGBT people on “the European Union’…
Read More…state senate as a Democrat, by informing voters that she played the online computer game “World of Warcraft.” The website colleensworld.com declared, “Maine needs a state senator that lives in the real world, not in Colleen’s fantasy world.” As in this latest instance, statements made “in character” were presented out of context. In any case, the strategy backfired. Not only did Lachowicz win the election, but outraged gamers around the country…
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