Religion Dispatches
…lthy gays and lesbians want to end our “religious freedoms” — which is the code phrase for “they want to pass hate crimes laws that make it illegal for us to call them the filthy sinners they are.” As a Christian, who just also happens to be a lesbian, I take offense at this continuing campaign on the religious right to promote this false dichotomy of gays vs. God. No one in the gay and lesbian community wants to curb anyone’s “religious freedom.”…
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…out? A People’s History covers 2000 years in 350 pages. Maybe it would be better to ask me what I left in. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? Recently, my eleven-year-old daughter told one of her fifth grade Sunday school classmates that her mother had written a book on church history. He replied, “What’s that about? Killing Muslims and Jews?” That pretty well sums it up—most people think that Christian history is about…
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…to make sure this predator was not around children. No one challenged the code of deference to those higher up and obedience to the rule of secrecy. Now we have “the largest institutional crisis in centuries, possibly in Church history,” declares the National Catholic Reporter in an editorial. The New York Times, which broke the story of abuse at the deaf school in Wisconsin, quotes a priest in Berlin as saying the crisis is “the worst in 100 yea…
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…s unthinkable terrorism? Ostensibly it’s the fruit of a centuries-old feud between the dogmatic Vatican and a radicalized remnant of the Illuminati, the brotherhood (or, as the book calls them, the “think tank”) of benevolent scientists whom the aforementioned religion cruelly repressed, and whose actual importance Brown greatly exaggerates. All this provides an occasion for a handful of discourses on the errors of both a stultifying religion and…
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…litical zone larger now than ever before. The Modern West’s allegedly life-promoting institutions, precisely because of their excessive materialism, actually foster death. This is not a superficial analysis or critique, and there is much in it that a progressive secularist could agree with. Feminism and sexual ethics frame the issues where the two sides necessarily part company. It is important to recall that Catholic anti-Modernism is not new; it…
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…icissitudes. If only. At its hip-swinging height, love permeates, pressing between gritted teeth and crow’s feet, between the tedium of a day and the discontents of whatever profession. Etta may be right that it’s the thrill you rest your cheek to, and St. Paul may have it when he says it endures all things. But these Weddings don’t live on love; they live on calculation. One of the wicked pleasures as a reader of the announcements is to fantasize…
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…ess creativity of the universe and the objective validity of human rights. Promoting and accepting religious images as universal will help heal culture war divisions and promote the formation of a broad-based progressive coalition. Frederick Clarkson: Thanks for hosting this discussion, Linell. I think these matters are integral to the functioning, the advance, and indeed the survival of Constitutional democracy. But I think that in order to give…
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…ry discourses about contraception and abortion regularly made a connection between female sexuality and demonic influence (an image in a book from the National Police Gazette shows a young woman, a scaly demon emerging from her vagina with a caption that reads “The Female Abortionist”); In the early twentieth century, silent film actress Theda Bara became the archetypal “vamp” who used sex to lure men to their deaths while Adele Farrington, in a p…
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…ere he codifies into the more marketable slogan “I want Jesus to make me a better Jew.” But what does this mean? “[You] needn’t worry that I might leave Judaism,” he assures his wife (and thereby his reader) toward the beginning of his escapade. “I [have] no intention of doing any such thing.” Thus ensconced within safe parameters, he sets out on a circumscribed journey of self-discovery, like Odysseus tied to the mast so that he can hear, but not…
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…and distortion, it generally refers to innate intuitive ability to discern between right and wrong. Moosa argues that Muslim inability to probe scientific data relating to GMOs and to more actively engage in debates is a product of location. With many Muslim communities located in the developing world, it can be politically disadvantageous to argue with potentially life-saving technology. While science and technology are often presented as a panac…
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