Religion Dispatches
…r living”). This is often lost on commentators. While scientists and journalists assess AA by the standards of the medical community (i.e. percentage of individuals who remain sober), AA members assess one another according to quite different metrics: levels of honesty, compassion, open-mindedness, and magnanimity. Although AA was instrumental in shifting the discourse about alcoholism from one of “sin” to “sickness” it nevertheless retained a foc…
Read More…r living”). This is often lost on commentators. While scientists and journalists assess AA by the standards of the medical community (i.e. percentage of individuals who remain sober), AA members assess one another according to quite different metrics: levels of honesty, compassion, open-mindedness, and magnanimity. Although AA was instrumental in shifting the discourse about alcoholism from one of “sin” to “sickness” it nevertheless retained a foc…
Read More…cher; nephew of H.V. Sheshadri, the former general secretary of the nationalist paramilitary R.S.S.; Modi’s long-term spiritual advisor; and chairman of the committee for the International Day of Yoga—spoke about yoga’s power to make homosexuality disappear. Yet, despite all of the bluster and campaigning, when the same Supreme Court agreed this year to reconsider Section 377 in response to a petition claiming it violated LGBTQ Indians’ rights to…
Read More…s interactions with Kendrick. Why? Why would a well-established male journalist say to a female blogger young enough to be his daughter, “Hey, even though there’s no reason to sexualize our interactions, let’s sexualize them anyway!”? Maybe he wanted to feel young and frisky and cool, and thought he deserved to feel those things at her expense? In our collective imagination, prostitutes are people whose consent can be purchased, after which it can…
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…ral character. Even respectable white women like Ford must comply with the code of silence protecting toxic masculinity. The demonization of Ford by the right is yet another indication of how low the GOP faithful are willing to go to gut human and civil rights. As ReproAction Network has noted, Kavanaugh’s repugnant record on women’s rights puts him in lockstep with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. His well-documented, insidious appellate co…
Read More…he attendant problems of memory and record-keeping that entails. Fundamentalist Christians rejected these accounts. But more importantly, fundamentalists critiqued the methods, assumptions, and institutions of the expert elites. Fundamentalists questioned the biologists’ and Bible scholars’ suspension of the question of God’s supernatural intervention. They rejected the secular university as a site of neutral science and objective scholarship. And…
Read More…, when a federal judge in Wisconsin found the relevant portions of the tax code to be unconstitutional, but the three judges on the appellate panel did not tip their hand, although they showed few outward signs that they agreed. The regulation at issue is more than sixty years old, enacted in the 1950s to ensure that ministers at churches who could not afford to provide them with housing could nevertheless benefit from the same tax breaks as minis…
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…also characterized by a spiritual industry whose rhetoric reflected capitalist-individualist understandings of “progress.” This largely replaced the radical anti-hierarchical, egalitarian, anti-capitalist understandings of emancipation that had flourished in 1960s and 1970s spiritual movements. Consider the political dissenter Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World and what it represented to many participants in the 1960s British-America…
Read More…layed a key role in constructing a coalition of conservative states, which promote an agenda aiming to undermine the consensus on equality and respect for minority rights, which lies at the heart of the global human rights treaties. This coalition, led by Russia and supported by Central Asian, Muslim and African states, has recently begun attracting support from European countries. The report also addresses the use of “gender ideology” as an umbre…
Read More…t Buttigieg (and all the other candidates) to read Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, and internalize its lessons. Social leaders who want to effect meaningful change are condemned to represent the interests of their group, even though doing so might contradict their personal moral code. The short version of Niebuhr is that you can lead or you can have clean hands, not both. In 2019 America, that means you can embrace the people who are actu…
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