find cheap airline tickets anywhere 3/31 – 4/7 phone number 1-800-299-7264 | Search Results | Religion Dispatches

For Clergy Who Ministered Through the AIDS Crisis Covid is Both Eerily Familiar and Puzzlingly Different

By Lynne Gerber

…urch, in the mid-80s. Today she’s the pastor at City of Refuge, a UCC/Metho-Bapti-Costal church, and leads The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, a global community of churches committed to radical inclusivity. With AIDS, she recalled, people who looked sick were marginalized “because of the position that the church took that if you have this dirty disease you’re a dirty person. But in this particular environment it’s the church that’s the dirty…

Discovering “Little Syria”—New York’s Long-Lost Arab Neighborhood

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…r of the “Pen Group” of Syrian-Lebanese writers that also included the much-more-famous Kahlil Gibran. For Fine, the Save Washington Street project is part of the same effort. “We are persistent,” he told me by phone, “because these stories have a real impact on people.” Telling stories grounded in real Arab-American history is the only way to reach understanding. And understanding is still sorely needed. One imagines what the Islamophobic activis…

A Portrait of Islamophobia?

By Mariam Durrani

…mage to portray a large, black male (read as ‘thuggish’), rather than an 18-year-old high school graduate about to start his college career. With hashtags (#IfTheyGunnedMeDown), Black Twitter immediately drew attention to the lack of media consciousness around how certain images, e.g. those marked by smiles and graduation caps, rendered Brown as humanized and valuable, while other images and discourses aligned him with a thuggish persona clearly f…

War on Christmas Affirmed by Southern Baptist Convention

By Mark Gstohl

…y Hanukah or Happy Kwanzaa or Happy Ramadan to their customers? What if non-Christian customers don’t wish to be to be greeted with “Merry Christmas?” Should Christians care about their feelings? It’s my contention that they should. Loving one’s neighbor involves respecting and being sensitive to their feelings. My suggestion is that if Southern Baptists feel the need to de-secularize Christmas they should practice the teachings of Christ and refl…

Pennsylvania Rep. Says Contraception Mandate Is Like Pearl Harbor and 9/11

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…who have ever experienced a truly grievous affront to their agency and well-being are these three groups: 1) victims of the Pearl Harbor attack; 2) victims of the 9/11 attacks; and 3) the boss who thinks Unitarian Stella from accounting shouldn’t be using birth control and by gum he’s not going to pay for a policy that lets her do so without copay. Maybe the evidence that contraception improves women’s health does not enter into his analysis at al…

Finding the “Good Girl Role Model”

By Kathryn Joyce

…ing her as a heroine of the faith, another “Agata” came into the news: a 14-year-old girl who was 11 weeks pregnant, after an alleged rape at the hands of a school friend, was seeking an abortion to end the pregnancy. In the media, fresh from ecstasies of mourning Mroz, the minor came to be known under the pseudonym “Agata,” as though a dark counterpoint to the example of the fallen, selfless mother. In a report prepared in early June, members of…

United Methodists Elect 1st Gay Bishop; Canadian Anglicans OK Same-Sex Marriage

By Peter Montgomery

…ing pride celebrations is booming, but that visibility and progress go hand-in-hand with continuing resistance, bullying, homophobia, and violence. Bosnia and Herzogovina: Anti-discrimination law protects LGBT and intersex people The House of People of the Parliamentary Assembly adopted amendments to the country’s anti-discrimination, including sexual orientation and gender identity and stating explicitly that “sex characteristics” are a prohibite…

The Fragility of Our Reality: A Conversation with the Brain Behind PBS Miniseries on Neuroscience

By Michael Schulson

…and decision-making. But that more traditional work has included some less-than-traditional research techniques—Eagleman has dropped research subjects from a 150-foot-tall tower to study their time perception under duress—and some more wide-ranging intellectual explorations, including a popular study of the subconscious brain, a book about the internet, and an experimental novel, Sum, in which Eagleman imagines 40 possible versions of the afterli…

Maryland Governor says Support for Marriage Equality “Very Much Informed” by his Catholicism

By Peter Montgomery

…working with several hundred clergy, and said a volunteer group of equality-supporting Catholics is doing weekly phone banks. Levin mentioned last Friday’s press conference with equality-supporting African American clergy from Maryland and national figures including Rev. Al Sharpton. Also speaking was Rev. Christine Wiley of Covenant Baptist United Church of Christ in Washington DC; Wiley was a co-chair of DC Clergy United for Marriage Equality, w…

The “Marginalization” of Tim Keller: When Anything Short of Adulation Is Oppression

By Anita Little

…onoring Keller for his “urban mission,” it’s easy to forget the work of not-as-visible clergy, activists and scholars—many of them women or people of color or queer—who have been active in these communities for years to little fanfare. Keller’s supporters love to lionize him and his Redeemer Presbyterian Church, but one rarely sees discussion on how Keller’s rise to the spotlight in NYC might have come at the expense of less societally privileged…