Religion Dispatches
…r otherworldly. And that’s why we all heaved a sigh of relief when David Axelrod came on television to threaten to fire any campaign staff who used the word “weird” to describe Romney. Still, regardless of the Obama campaign pledge not to play dog-whistle politics with Romney’s religion, the question remains for many Mormons: what makes us so “weird” to the rest of the American public? It’s a subject that Mormons will have to face and learn to eng…
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…social construct, and the feeling of truth may be merely the feeling of a belief held for a long time. If you’re raised not to eat pork, the simple act of eating can induce a feeling of guilt “deep down,” even if one has long ago ceased to keep kosher. Guilt has nothing to do with substantive merit—as gay people know all too well. The emotive response of guilt remains long after the mind, heart, and spirit have all reconciled themselves to the rea…
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…tually specific. And while modes of social injustice may be at times interrelated (i.e. the relationship between racism and classism, or the cultural connection between sexism and homophobia), they are still distinguishable and historically contingent. Racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, ageism, etc., are all independent categories. We know that white women can fight against male hierarchy even as they ignore their own complicity in terms of rac…
Read More…rch’s treatment of California Indians clearly sends the message that they believe that evangelizing is saintly behavior even if it means the destruction, domination and the stealing of land of indigenous people. Speakers had no expectation that the canonization mass would not go forward, but they suggested it would backfire on the church by stoking continued outrage among indigenous people and draw closer scrutiny to church doctrines and practices…
Read More…appens to be a lesbian, I take offense at this continuing campaign on the religious right to promote this false dichotomy of gays vs. God. No one in the gay and lesbian community wants to curb anyone’s “religious freedom.” What our community is fighting for is our freedom to not be abused in the name of religion and to not have our freedoms curtailed or denied in the name of religion. The ultimate goal of gay and lesbian people, in my opinion, is…
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…is also highly critical of the SBC Executive Committee’s failure to adopt relatively modest reforms over a twenty-year period, concluding that “very little was done to address sexual abuse within SBC churches.” And, according to the Washington Post: Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could maintain a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when top leaders were secretly keeping a private li…
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…ame the archetypal “vamp” who used sex to lure men to their deaths while Adele Farrington, in a pre-Code romp called The Devil’s Bondwoman (1916), portrayed a woman whose sexual appetites were so insatiable that she attracted Satan himself. By the 1940s, a comic book entitled Madame Satan [see image left] told a similar story to adolescents of a seductive woman who, using Satan’s supernatural power, attempted to lead men to destruction. Doesn’t th…
Read More…ce. The church insists that it cannot, in good conscience, allow its sincerely-held teachings to be violated on its watch. The elders take a vote and come back with a decision: They’ll be HAPPY to let the church be the polling place, and serve the common good, but only if they can restrict voting to men. Their critics protest: “Women have a right to vote in this country, for heaven’s sake! What is wrong with you people? If you strike this arrangem…
Read More…s.” What conference-goers won’t do is hear from is LGBT people. Last week Eliel Cruz, president of the Intercollegiate Adventist Gay-Straight Alliance, criticized his church for planning a conference in Africa “to talk about LGBT people without allowing them to share their stories or perspectives.” Cruz wrote: The break-out session titles help show just how extreme and one-sided this conference will be. For example, “Alternative Sexualities: A Di…
Read More…some background in scriptural interpretation will remember that John’s Revelation was written as a kind of code to an audience hard-pressed by persecution and loss. Few believe that its message was intended to be taken literally—much less as a roadmap to events two millennia in the future—but rather to provide comfort and reassurance to a struggling community. It is a bitter irony therefore to see it taken out of context and used to attack a poli…
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