Religion Dispatches
…ne of evangelical conviction,” is the focus on international Christianity. Number five on the CT list: Christians flee Iraq and Gaza: About 13,000 Christians—or one in two—left Mosul in October. In Gaza, churches where hundreds worshiped until recently are attended by less than a dozen. Historic Christian communities are becoming history. 4.) TOP TEN ONION RELIGION STORIES: “Jewish Elders Lift Ham Ban.” For instance. 5.) TOP TEN ABUSES OF RELIGION…
Read More…his recap, with a wave of homophobic rhetoric from religious and political officials. That wave continued this week, as Lester Feder and Rin Hindryati report at BuzzFeed. Last Friday, the former Information and Communications Minister Tifatul Semberling, currently a member of Parliament from the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party, tweeted that the Prophet Mohammed said “Whomever you find committing the acts of the community of Lot (homosexual) shou…
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…as gauche and enabling an already-voyeuristic culture. Reporters still on site in Newtown were viewed as parasitic. Just go home already and leave these people to their grieving. But a more generous view is that we needed to return to these petty details in order process the trauma and to grieve for the victims—and for ourselves. Though it sounds soppy in a secular age, we all lost those children, and we all in turn needed to confront this trauma…
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…llow unassisted childbirthers. Balizet, a former nurse and the author of a number of books on Christian home-living, motherhood, and home birthing, represents a fringe expression of the Quiverfull suspicion of mainstream, institutional experts. She condemns banks, public schools, “statist” government, and denominational churches, but she saves her harshest judgment for institutional medicine: a bastion of pagan religion, where doctors serve as “hi…
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…rmer Post correspondent himself) in an article cross-posted on Olivet’s website and on christianpost.com. According to Park, the event described was not a wedding, but a “service for couples who desire to dedicate their family to God in front of other believers before marriage.” Park also contends that couples are not arranged, but “apply to participate after a period of courtship.” Park goes on to point out that after the initial CT article, Chua…
Read More…anti-LGBT and anti-West summit of the World Congress of Families, was the site of a strange attack by “far-right extremists” on a vegan café. More from the Guardian: According to the statement, the attackers “pulled out grilled meat, sausages, and fish and started eating them and throwing them at us… they were just trying to provoke our friends and disrespect us.” The statement also alleged that members of group had come to the neighbourhood a mo…
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…sota who said children only become people at age 5. Another said “a common number that is going around is 4 years old.” Arguments that college students make to provoke activists and demonstrators should probably not be taken at face value, but more importantly neither these people nor McArdle’s article offered any data indicating an increase in support for infanticide. In fact, Gallup polls show Americans are pretty evenly divided on abortion. A r…
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…T people. Munson sent word out across the Mormon grapevine, through email, phone, and Facebook, inviting fellow churchgoing and believing Mormons to join her at the Pride Parade in Sunday dress. And Mormons responded by the hundreds, arriving at the parade route yesterday morning in their church clothes—dress shirts and ties for men, dresses for women. Some carried scriptures in hand. Others pushed their children in strollers, or carried them on t…
Read More…have been a helpful tidbit for Wills’s column. But if there’s no time for phone calls or web searches, well, at the very least, there are fact-checkers. And here’s a modest proposal for the editors at the New York Review of Books and the New York Times and every other publication that will be running a lot of Mormon content this campaign season but has no Mormons on its editorial staff: Hire a Mormon fact checker. There are a number of advanced g…
Read More…g a lot of energy responding to a blog post I recently wroteabout a record number of creationist bills introduced in state legislatures since January. I write numerous posts about intelligent design and the Discovery Institute’s disingenuous attacks on evolution education, so I’m not sure why this particular post has gotten them so hot and bothered. First, David Klinghoffer had a bit of a snit on DI’s Evolution News last week over the issue of pee…
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