Religion Dispatches
…slim Community. Even Ahmadi Muslim mosques are not counted among the total number of mosques in America. As another example, when 86 Ahmadi Muslims were brutally massacred in twin bomb attacks in Lahore on May 28th, only one American Muslim leader offered condolences to the Community. More tellingly, Professor Rashid appears to blame American Muslim diversity for the failure of American Muslim organizations to speak out against extremism with the…
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…r words, the ACLU was arguing on first amendment grounds that Rowan County officials were favoring Christianity. In response, these North Carolina lawmakers proclaimed that the first amendment did not apply to North Carolina. The wildly overshooting lawmakers garnered immediate media attention (“North Carolina May Declare Official State Religion Under New Bill,” reported The Huffington Post) and alarmed those who felt that Christian theocrats had…
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…; for instance, one of the monotheisms. The danger here is that government officials will be given the power and authority to determine how the tradition is to be understood and honored. As Winnifred Fallers Sullivan proposes in her 2007 book The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, such determinations will tend to favor official or “high” religion—practices linked to recognizable doctrine supported by canonical texts and clerical hierarchies—over…
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…he one Elizabeth Smart attended. Mind you, such lessons are nowhere in the official sex education curriculum of the state of Utah. Nor are they to be found in the current handbooks or youth instructional manuals of the LDS Church. The most current LDS youth manuals (released in January 2013) reflect a steady effort on the part of LDS Church leaders to revise out especially punitive messages about sexuality, especially those that might compound fe…
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…on, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. “We decided that ad space on our website isn’t the best way to get our message out,” King said. “What we’ve found is that people tend to respond to the ads and fail to have productive discussions.” King wrote a blog post on Sojourners’ website describing his personal experience with a gay friend who was alienated by the church, and he endorsed the message of the Believe Out Loud video. Sojourners thought it b…
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…pe is not very different from election of a president or other top-ranking official in a hierarchical organization. S/he brings with her/him a whole entourage of lower ranking officials, much like in the U.S. when the Republicans are defeated by the Democrats or vice versa. The winner brings a team. So now it’s time for the people who lost the election to get out of the way and let Francis govern. Conservatives are not pleased with his views, and…
Read More…so inclined, say a simple “Amen.” Here’s the video. After years of college officials mocking their requests, Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed suit last year on behalf of eight professors and students. Three months before the suit was filed, President Wagner responded to the impending lawsuit by basically using a public invocation ceremony to say that anyone who isn’t a fundamentalist can go to hell. From the initial compla…
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…y, read as other than ironically arbitrary and anti-semitic in effect. The official statement tries to limit the damage: Our resolution understands boycott as limited to a refusal on the part of the Association in its official capacities to enter into formal collaborations with Israeli academic institutions, or with scholars who are expressly serving as representatives or ambassadors of those institutions, or on behalf of the Israeli government, u…
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…ed ‘information revolution.’ Particularly among the opinion makers in the ‘official’ Jewish establishment criticism of Israel is considered an attempt to ‘deligitimize’ the state. Oz’s critique of force as the commonly applied ‘solution’ to the political aspirations of the Palestinians hearkens back to the writings of Israel’s most trenchant critic of the occupation, Professor Y. Leibowitz of the Hebrew University. In the aftermath of the 1967 War…
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…student group, which affirms marriage equality, is still not acknowledged officially by Biola.) Clearly, attitudes around LGBTQ inclusion are changing rapidly in the evangelical Christian community but they’re not following a linear path toward progress. Rather the change has been in a dynamic and almost chaotic way—two steps forward, three steps back, and one to the side— seemingly driven more by passionate emotions (especially fear) than reason…
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