Religion Dispatches
…le churchgoing and religious belief are the highest in the nation — making African American communities the most unwaveringly religious in the U.S. At the same time, African American communities are among the most economically and racially disenfranchised; in the U.S., African Americans are still disproportionately poor, under-educated and over-incarcerated. Black incarceration rates and black homelessness parallel each other. And for all of the s…
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…in the college handbook. Does Crook see a connection between the worldview promoted at Central Baptist and the violence and rejection LGBT people often face? “There’s a lot of talk about religious bigotry,” he says. “About Christians hating other people for the way they act. I don’t think that’s true. We don’t hate them—we love them like we love anybody else. We just happen to disagree with them. That gets turned around into they hate us, and it m…
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…lso the millstone that should sink forever the idol of a uniquely Virtuous Republic. But oh how hard it is to excise the idea that racism is peripheral, and not central, to the many stumbles and blockages and outright violations of the democratic ideal. The Times recently published a feature piece by Michael Powell that quoted every single nationally prominent Black conservative thinker to the effect that we should basically stop talking about whi…
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…enfranchised people trying to exist within an ever-expanding white settler republic. It isn’t always easy to know who to root for. Perhaps, like many African Americans, my attachment to Thanksgiving is simply residue of the relative respite that enslaved Africans gained during the holiday season from some of their labors, however minimal. According to the African-American Registry, “In October 1863, months after signing the Emancipation Proclamati…
Read More…al acts, while zina violations carry a penalty of 100 lashes. The criminal code also allows Islamic courts to dismiss charges against rape suspects who take an Islamic oath, sumpah dilaknat Allah, asserting their innocence – so long as the court determines there’s a lack of incriminating “other evidence.” Within days of Aceh’s bylaws coming into force, special Sharia police arrested two “suspected lesbians” – women aged 18 and 19 – who were spotte…
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…lack American Church, but a variety of religious entities that are part of African-American Religious experience and the broader African Diaspora religious experience. Until then it will be difficult to move forward in the historical narrative, not only because of the captivity of the past, but the captivity to the caricature of what the black Church has become. Stereotypes, however harsh, have a way of multiplying themselves. It is difficult to i…
Read More…, Gender Identity and Expression,” a three-day seminar hosted by the South African government and the South African Human Rights Commission. Mushwana further noted that, despite “unacceptably high levels of violence that are perpetrated solely due to another person’s sexual orientation or gender identity… we are acutely aware that discussions on these matters are either difficult or not tolerated by many leaders, be they politicians, religious lea…
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…cultural conservatism in the United States. The foundation of this source code (the motherlode of the code, as it were) is Catholic natural law moral philosophy. Natural law is the 800-year-old Thomist tradition that absorbs (from revelation and scripture) and communicates (into public discourse and legal practice) a quite specific understanding of the human individual as the summit of God’s creation. First Things has hosted some of the most impo…
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…was the language? Well, the principal thing about the catechism was: if an African was going to be included in the church, they had to first take a vow that if they saw any of their sister or brother Africans disobedient to their masters, or seeking to run away, that they would disclose that information to people in authority—and if they didn’t, that would constitute a reason to put them out. That’s one thing. Secondly, that they would understand…
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…ical conclusion from this was that the laws and constitution of the Weimar Republic had not sufficiently protected democracy and the rule of law. To counter this, a number of protective mechanisms were written into the Basic Law of the Federal Republic. One of these is the possibility of banning political parties. Too often, it’s assumed that fascists and authoritarians mostly come to power via coup, violently overthrowing the existing political o…
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