Religion Dispatches
…at cross purposes. My first thought was to kick myself for leaving my cell phone behind. This would have made a terrific picture. My second thought was to find a less obtrusive spot where I could watch to see how this excruciatingly slow drama would play out. But before I could move, my husband drifted up behind me in his kayak, took one look at the frog and snake and muttered, “I can’t take this.” Over my objections (“But it’s nature!”) Jeff stre…
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…idn’t flirt and was a virgin and was on her way to church dressed in a neck-to-toe Oshkosh B’Gosh jumper when he jumped out of the bushes with a knife; and did all the other things that make it rape-rape—then she shouldn’t have to bear the child or the additional trauma, the thinking goes. Or, evidently, used to go. Perhaps now people are waking up to the fact that this position is consistent if you believe pregnancy is the price women are suppose…
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…. Gary LaMoine of Assumption Church in Barnesville, Minnesota to prevent 17-year-old Lennon Cihak from receiving the sacrament of confirmation, a rite of passage usually administered to Catholic teenagers to “perfect the work of baptism” (the first of the sacraments, in Roman Catholic teaching) and mark their maturity as Catholic Christians. Likewise, the boy’s family members have been prevented from receiving the sacrament of Holy Communion at th…
Read More…S. Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTI Persons held a series of low-profile meetings in Jakarta. While high-level efforts offer hope on the horizon, the situation for LGBTI people in Aceh and West Java provinces becomes more dangerous. Violent Islamist movements inspired by Islamic State are growing in these areas and activists are attempting to set up a safe house network to provide protection for targeted individuals forced to evacuate t…
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…to Wal-Mart, ate pizza in their hotel rooms, spent hours with them on the phone. Then, after Jesus was a no-show, I stayed in contact with them—the ones who would talk to me, anyway—over the following days and months, checking back in to see how or if their thinking had changed. I learned a lot about the seductive power of radical belief, the inscrutable vagaries of biblical interpretation, and how our minds can shape reality to fit a narrative….
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…ne” and praised Obradovic’s diatribe against LGBT activists as “a true tour-de-force, an incredibly powerful rebuke of the LGBT movement.” In the speech Brown loves so much, Obradovic called the gay rights movement “a totalitarian cult” and said gay pride parades should be outlawed, saying “What does Pride week even mean? What pride? What are you people proud of? … it is a week of provocation and forceful promotion of the ideology of homosexualism…
Read More…und the Trump campaign, and every week seems to bring a new not-necessarily-a-scandal-but-it-sure-sounds-fishy kind of incident. Among other things, the candidate has tweeted an anti-Semitic image, made a comment to Republican Jews about their penchant for business, repeatedly declined to disavow David Duke, and, most recently, hired a media executive whose website was recently described by a former employee as “a cesspool of the alt-right…a movem…
Read More…hey distributed “6 million voter guides, 8 million mail pieces, 15 million phone calls, 500,000 doors knocked on by volunteers, and radio advertising covering 56 congressional districts and 22 U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races,” they are now (apparently as I write this) surveying voters to learn “who went to the polls and why.” Instructive for those of us who follow the influence of the religious right on the tea party movement (arguing that it’…
Read More…w [SB 6239] already states that no religion shall be forced to perform same-sex marriages. Still, backers of the referendum are trumpeting out misleading arguments about same-sex marriage compromising religious freedom. We will counter those with facts. SL: And doctrine too. Agency—the right of individuals to make moral choices—is an important element of Mormon belief. Forbidding civil gay marriage means forbidding people from choosing. To close,…
Read More…e report was “unequivocally false” and that if there were in fact “Catholic-to-Catholic phonebanking questioning Mitt Romney’s faith,” “our organization had no part in them.” Catholics for Obama also pointed to a statement released last fall by a number of lay Catholic leaders decrying Pastor Robert Jeffress’ pejorative public declamation of Romney’s Mormonism as a “cult” and calling for civility in the 2012 campaign. As the 2012 campaign heads in…
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