Religion Dispatches
…damnation for things (like homosexuality) that millennials see as simply judgmental and unfair. If organized religion can’t renew itself from the inside, this new generation will switch to a new platform—even if they have to invent it for themselves….
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…(if there ever really were such things). Effectively participating in the new social media environment is not a matter of picking up a new vocabulary of glyphs, images, and sounds that will “capture” the attention of those with whom we want to connect. Digital media has no captives. At least so far, no one’s really figured out how to effectively and durably colonize it. And, I’m pretty sure that’s all to the good. A meaningful interactive pilgrim…
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…rly culture and it continues to value freedom of enquiry, the discovery of new materials, and the promotion of novel points of view. What you sense most clearly at the Vatican Library is that popes come and go, as professors do, but books and the society of learning remain. We are all links in a chain, not just the men who claim an apostolic succession going back to Peter. The fact that this book is on display in that Library now is something for…
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…ence both prior to, and during, January 6, research he describes both in a new epilogue to the paperback edition of his book The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American, as well as in the new report. As Seidel put it during the February 9 webinar: “America is a shared idea. And Christian nationalism refuses to share. It excludes non-Christians and the wrong kind of Christians, as this report shows…. This is the choice we face as a…
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…ted States continues under the fraught leadership of Donald Trump, we find new iterations of the “Christian nation,” new connections and clashes between immigration bans, the religious right, and women’s rights. But if oppression relies on strange alliances, so does resistance. Sowing the seeds of liberation often entails looking back to the past and reaffirming elements of one’s own traditions, persons, and events that have been overlooked or wil…
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…hat “any effort to protect religious liberty has brighter prospects with a new Congress and new administration.” So, barring some truly unexpected outbreak of empathy in the newly empowered Republican Party, it’s safe to assume the sweeping legislation will become law early on in Trump’s presidency. The president-elect has signaled his support for the bill, promising Catholics in a September statement that he will sign the bill into law. Once FADA…
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…lence, but a commitment to action? Does the Tibetan movement have the potential, like other recent movements, to manifest itself in more aggressive forms? Or, has self-immolation become a new modus operandi of the Tibetan movement? Whatever the answers, it does seem that the movement for Tibetan freedom is indeed entering a new phase. …
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…ning. What is news this time around is that rank and file Catholics want a new Church, not just a new pope. We know that change is in the air because we put it there. Progressive Catholics all over the world are creating new forms of church since the old is so thoroughly discredited. No institution can withstand the onslaught of negative publicity that the Vatican earned over clergy sexual abuse and episcopal cover-ups without major changes. No hi…
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…st ambitions in completely undoing the premises and core principles of the New Deal and the postwar social compact. They accomplished this feat in just 30 years of concerted effort. Andersen shows us how they did it through sins of commission but also sins of omission: quietly declining to renew key regulatory provisions, dropping cost-of-living indexing for recipients of various public benefits, letting the real value of the federal minimum wage…
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…President Vladimir Putin’s supporters took to calling Europe “Gayropa” and promoting Russia as the antithesis of the West. Singapore: New rules require government permission for foreign involvement in pride Reuters reported this week that Singapore has posted new rules about public speaking that will restrict foreign firms from funding or publicly supporting a gay pride event without a special permit. This year’s pride celebration in June had been…
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