Religion Dispatches
…e loophole Sullivan gives himself on the matter of sexual freedom is the characteristic heresy of progressive Christians: “It is to progressive Christianity as the heresy of the prosperity gospel, or nationalism, is to conservative American Christianity.” Just two points about this. First, it has not been my experience that progressive Christians are blind to the problems of a hypersexualized culture or that they/we are saying libertinism is accep…
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…ing to religion and religious exemptions from laws that ban discrimination against LGBTQ people, during arguments Tuesday at the Supreme Court. Breyer’s exchange with Solicitor General Noel Francisco came as battle between religious exemptions and LGBT rights returned to the Court in the form of three cases involving employees fired for being gay or transgender. These disputes, involving a gay skydiving instructor from New York, a gay county emplo…
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…the very first Hunger Games, and some citizens of Panem—erm, I mean America—are beginning to realize that Donald Trump might be the villain of this story. The release of the ruinous “pussy-grabbing” tapes gave many GOP diehards the excuse they finally needed to chuck their violins and abandon a sinking ship. You would think one of the groups rushing to the last lifeboat would be younger conservatives, who might possess better preservation instinc…
Read More…o it does look grim for the Godless, unless you take a closer look at the data. The relevant question from the survey, “powered by Barna Group,” is this one: Question: For the year that just ended – 2013 – what was the total amount of money that you donated to all charities and non-profit organizations, including churches and religious organizations, if any? Of course we can’t know what percentage of the total money given by respondents was giv…
Read More…posted at the streetcorners. I have curly hair. I got it often. Now the Chabad have turned it up a notch with “Unite the Beards,” a slick and schlocky video campaign designed to show hipsters that hey, we all have beards… so maybe we’re not so different, you and I… Unfortunately, the Times reports that the beards that did show up were probably all Hasidic: “Maybe it was the lack of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer (or alcohol at all) or special brewed coff…
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…f the first companies to really understand—and build its business strategy around—the specific skills of women workers, who adapted well to the service industry and could be paid little. The same sorts of “people skills” that women had long been expected to exemplify through unpaid domestic work were being recognized as valuable by Wal-Mart, which offered female employees the homey promise that they were important members of Wal-Mart’s corporate “…
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…isn’t different than what goes on in any Pentecostal church in America or around the world. However, looking back, what I should have said was that there are streams of people crossing each other, and what is happening can have a multiplicity of meanings. That is how to think about the NAR, dominionism, all of these movements that people are involved in. In evangelical and Pentecostal churches, most people have a home church they identify with, b…
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…interpreted in light of the Episcopal Church’s larger culture of inaction around sexual violence. See no evil, hear no evil… LGBTQ+ Episcopalians, and especially those who identify under the transgender and nonbinary umbrella, were far more likely than their cisgender and heterosexual counterparts to cite a fear that nothing would be done or that they’d be retaliated against as their top reasons not to report instances of sexual abuse to denomina…
Read More…ork for you. The article literally discusses someone getting Third-World peasants to loan her a cell in a pinch. You don’t get much more entitled than that. Still, there is something to be said for the virtues of unhooking from technology. I sometimes wonder if the convenience of having a cell is worthwhile, given that one of its most common uses is to find out where my wife got to in Kohl’s. But it seems to me that focusing on the micro-trend of…
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…ompaniment, chanted on iPod, and piped from watches into earplugs—they are available in as many digital forms as there are devices to access them. Hopeful worshippers are even constructing their own online religious “texts” in the form of digitized prayers, video accompaniment to existing religious texts, and the recording and sharing of recitation of prayers and liturgy. But as religious texts go digital, they acquire new qualities. What are the…
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