Religion Dispatches
…s linked to the state, has been most resistant to these ordinations, and Tibetan Buddhism under the Dalai Lama has been considering reviving the tradition, but as of today, no final decision has been made. Muslim women—and feminists—are following a different and complicated path. This was brought home last month when I participated in a five day international conference in Malaysia which brought together 250 women from 47 countries, many of them p…
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…eems that may no longer be the case. That government was overbearing, it overreached, and now, it seems to be over. Let us pay less attention to the visibility of their religiosity, stop trying so hard to classify Arabs and Muslims between the acceptable and unacceptable, and spend a little more time in awe of what humans did before guns and tanks. Freedom is on the march. And, I might note, with only a tinge of sarcasm, we didn’t even need to inv…
Read More…mer athletes of color who had a positive experience with BYU and the Honor Code: “If Darron Smith wasn’t so hell bent on exposing BYU, the Church and the honor code office as racists, he’d find out that for every Thomas Stancil, Tico Pringle and Ray Hudson, there’s a Brandon Davies, Reno Mahe and Brian McDonald, the latter of which recovered from an alcohol-related probation, joined the Church and served a mission to Washington, DC.” Sikahema’s fu…
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…having a wisdom tooth pulled. They have sought to deny women our religious freedom as moral agents of our own lives and inflicted untold suffering on the colleagues, friends, and families of assassinated doctors and clinic workers, on their harassed patients, and on women without the resources to travel to states or countries that offer abortion services. The trifecta that Weyrich, Falwell, and their allies bet on appears headed toward major stumb…
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…d it as a noun, as the Greek and Latin translations did, then you take the bet as a preposition, “in,” and you get a simple declarative sentence familiar from the King James Version translation: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Full stop. What follows, “And the earth was without form, and void,” then describes the unformed, chaotic (tohu vabohu) earth that God just created from nothing. Taken this way, then, we imagine an a…
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…an rights are an administration priority. Brazil: Evangelicals launch ‘sin-free’ – ie gay-free – version of Facebook Pink News reports, “Brazilian Evangelicals have launched their own ‘sin-free’ version of Facebook, which is founded on love and acceptance – unless you’re gay.” FaceGloria reportedly attracted more than 100,000 users in its first month. South Korea: Gay couple sues government for marriage recognition In South Korea, where we reporte…
Read More…his religion (as well as his privacy rights). The Phelps case relied on a free speech claim instead of freedom of religion, and they won. So as the Supreme Court sees the right to freely practice one’s religion as “constitutionally irrelevant,” religion has been reduced in popular rhetoric to the right of the dominant religion to be free of any challenges to its dominance: wishing someone “happy holidays” in thought to violate the religious freed…
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…interests, for some this incident revealed that the people controlling the code have a lot of power. If one thinks that marketing agents put “Bible” in the code, then they might think of them as predatory, or presumptuous about U.S. Christians and their political affiliations. They might become angry that companies have such power in shaping the public’s perception of Christianity and, indeed, in shaping Christians’ own ideas about their communiti…
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…ement policies in respective regions or countries, and develop programs to promote religious freedom.” But given Brownback’s history of using “religious freedom” as a sword to discriminate against LGBT people, his nomination offers the strongest evidence yet that, when the Trump administration talks about “religious freedom,” it actually means “Christian supremacy.” Though Brownback an equal-opportunity excluder: the Council on American-Islamic Re…
Read More…abstractly; i.e. apart from a larger context that gives them meaning. For better or worse—and, to be clear, sometimes it is for the better, sometimes for the worse—a set of largely unwritten assumptions guides how, when, and in what manner to express or not express these rights. It’s when the code that translates these rights for us somehow ceases to function properly in the background that problems result. I want to suggest that often when probl…
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