Religion Dispatches
…s that poured money into the Proposition 8 campaign to ban gay marriage in California are backing National Marriage Week, which ends this Sunday on Valentine’s Day. “If we want to save heterosexual marriage in this country it won’t be by preventing anyone else from forming lifelong public unions,” Haffner said. “John Edwards’ and Tiger Woods’ marriages didn’t fall apart because two gay people down the street got married.” The Religious Institute r…
Read More…role of religious groups in both supporting and opposing Proposition 8 in California. As for my Beliefs columns, they have often listed homosexuality and same-sex marriage among many topics dividing churches or embroiling politics. Two columns dwelt on concerns of some constitutional scholars, including both proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage, about the religious freedom implications of legalizing same-sex marriage without providing ro…
Read More…el and is the second largest purchaser of textbooks in the country next to California) has been grabbing the anti-evolution headlines. Meanwhile, Christian fundamentalists next door may soon quietly slip creationist friendly textbooks — under the guise of “supplemental materials” — into local school districts. In 2008, lawmakers passed the Louisiana Science Education Act, which specifically targets “evolution, the origins of life, global warming,…
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…tian Economics in Tyler, Texas, and the Chalcedon Foundation in Vallecito, California. They have published a journal and a steady stream of books and booklets on the theological justification for interjecting Christian ideas into economic, legal, and political life. According to the most prolific Reconstruction writer, Gary North, it is “the moral obligation of Christians to recapture every institution for Jesus Christ.” He feels this to be especi…
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…n unprecedented growth of Jewish social justice organizations; groups like California’s Progressive Jewish Alliance, Avodah: The Jewish Service Corps, the environmental group Hazon, American Jewish World Service, Jewish Funds for Justice, the New York group Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Jews United for Justice in Washington DC—the list goes on. In addition, the eminence grise of Jewish social justice organizations, Chicago’s JCUA, hired Ji…
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…d Free Speech by Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood (California, 2009) This very rich little book seems to me a very good place to begin the new decade. It is smart, informed, thoughtful, urgent—and properly unsettling. It is also very difficult to read quickly or to summarize in short order. It is well worth the effort. The principal essays, by anthropologists Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, take the Danish cartoon controversy…
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…rd others. A few congregations affiliated with my organization in Southern California are doing exactly this: they are creating “safe space in tough times” where people can simply come and talk about real things and be heard, respected, and not manipulated. A Theology of Friendship But healthy religion can offer even more. The significantly underappreciated theologian, pastor, and mystic Howard Thurman maintained that social isolation lies at the…
Read More…in the District of Columbia; and Pastor Jim Garlow, a leading proponent of California’s Proposition 8 who claimed last night the health care bill violates the Ten Commandments. Rodriguez, who told me recently that he worked with Wallis “to push the House side in favor of an amendment that would protect the innocent or would restrict the funding of abortion procedures,” also coalesces with the Freedom Federation, a coalition of religious right orga…
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…evangelists, died yesterday of complications from a fall in Newport Beach, California. Perhaps no evangelist outside of Billy Graham has played such an integral role in contemporary American religious life in the last century. Roberts’ healing ministry, his seed-faith teachings, the creation of the City of Faith and Oral Roberts University are the highlights of the life of a fascinating American icon whose larger-than-life personality, visions, an…
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…the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape by Kirk Savage (University of California Press, 2009) Sixty-eight years ago last month, my grandfather was playing touch football with his new Army buddies at Fort Lewis, in Washington State—only to be interrupted by the announcement of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Years later, he would be fond of telling the story of how, in the midst of the pandemonium, he had to buttonhole a friend to ask whe…
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