Religion Dispatches
…s “weird.” The news set off a wave of speculation that weird was, in fact, code for Mormon, and that Obama and team planned to use the word “weird” as a dog-whistle to stoke voters’ antipathies towards Mormonism in 2012. The news set off a wave of cringes among Mormon politicos as well. Because Mormons do recognize “weird” as a word that sticks to us in the American imagination. In 1995, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley declared in an inter…
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…upon the visual. White LBGTQ persons have always had the option of simply code-switching when beneficial. Sexual orientation is rarely worn on one’s sleeve, face, or hair texture. Thus the particularity of white supremacy and legalized racial discrimination in previous epochs resists hackneyed comparisons to the black freedom struggle by those advocating other issues, regardless of how right or just these issues may be. At the same time, we all m…
Read More…of a new documentary, The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code. Also distributed at the press conference were excerpts from A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California Indians by the Spanish Missions, by Elias Castillo, which include Serra ordering whippings for Indians who fled the mission. The statement by Amah Mutsun Tribal Band chairman Lopez concluded: The Catholic Church will someday realize that canonization of Serra h…
Read More…lthy gays and lesbians want to end our “religious freedoms” — which is the code phrase for “they want to pass hate crimes laws that make it illegal for us to call them the filthy sinners they are.” As a Christian, who just also happens 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.”…
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…doubt that the use of “Letters of Good Standing” and the adoption of new “Codes of Conduct” (why either term is capitalized in the report is a mystery to me) will have much impact. Under the white supremacist patriarchy that still shapes so much of the American experience—not least in the SBC and similar churches—predatory white men will always be able to find people willing to attest to their “good character.” I’m reminded of Supreme Court “Just…
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…rings true in her take on it, in a script that crackles and pops with her signature dialogue. She tries to do even more, as she makes clear when she recently described the film as a “Trojan horse” meant to sneak a feminist message into the cineplex, subverting the paradigm of horror films in which women are merely the shrieking victims of male violence. I admire Cody’s effort, but am not sure she has subverted older paradigms as much as made them…
Read More…tals and so forth. So if one had to bring Boudway’s original analogy up to code, one would have to say this: Imagine you live in a country where the default way to buy food is buying it from your employer. You get a job, and your employer negotiates with companies who in turn have agreements with grocery stores and growers, shipping companies and meat processing plants, and so on. The end result of all this is that you get a card, which you presen…
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…dictates of the prophetic voice through a regimented system of behavior: a code of conduct thoroughly imbued with an ethos and a morality. The most articulate condemnations of torture that Judaism has to offer are therefore presented most effectively as deeply spiritual legal analyses. The best of these, in recent years, was composed by Rabbi Melissa Weintraub for Rabbis for Human Rights, an international organization focusing on a number of progr…
Read More…p, whose tax exempt status is under section (c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, risk their tax-exempt status if they use tax-exempt resources to endorse political candidates. Although the law is clear, no audits have been initiated since 2009, after a federal court ordered the agency to issue regulations clarifying requirements that audits of churches be authorized by an “appropriate high-level Treasury official.” During the uproar over the suppo…
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…ical community, one that represents not simply a broader agenda but also a significantly different spirit and worldview. Last week, Dr. David Gushee, Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University and author of The Future of Faith in American Politics: The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center, talked compellingly about the arrival of the evangelical center at a standing-room-only presentation at Third Way, a progre…
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