Religion Dispatches
…est Bible student turn back.” Genealogies are “boring” and “difficult”—because we can’t use them. But they were recorded and preserved with such care because the strangers who wrote that book could use them. For the huge majority of human history, they were the measure of a man’s life. They bound you to your history and your land; they gave you a place among cousins, grandparents, sprawling generations of ancestors, in a rooted institution radical…
Read More…ry of history”: Almighty God documents a history of meaning making and the use of those meanings to regulate bodies and identities: how Roman Catholics and Protestants looked to their respective traditions to understand marriage and race; how they “knew” their beliefs and their interpretations of texts to be correct; how those beliefs were subsequently encoded into laws that regulated human behaviors; and even how love has been, and continues to b…
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…ations of Islam. They might sound like Islam and refer to Islam, but their use of Islam is not dissimilar from the use of scientific fact by the creationist: She intends to undermine the scientific enterprise with scientific language, suggesting how wholly the discursive space has been dominated by a certain kind of language, but also how easy it is to fool the outsider into thinking he is encountering a serious, rigorous, and historically and tex…
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…o many gay men affected by the AIDS crisis. I left this discussion out because, again, it took away from the cohesion of the book as a whole. And with all the recent debates about PrEP (a pill that can be used to prevent HIV transmission) and gay marriage, I felt there were more pressing issues to engage—okay, and I figured maybe the plays were best left to theatre historians and performance theorists. What are some of the biggest misconceptions a…
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…the clearest and most present danger for LGBT Americans, particularly because it exemplifies the ways in which the bedrock principle of “religious freedom” has been weaponized to block the advance of LGBT equality. When FADA was first introduced by Idaho Rep. Raul Labrador introduced in July 2015, it garnered 172 co-sponsors in the House. All of them were Republicans. The bill stalled in the Democrat-controlled Senate, and Labrador even attempted…
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…must not let a few bishops at the top hinder the global effort simply because they continue to fight change within the Church. In 2010, the Pope made an important first step in a journey that the leaders in the Church must make towards a compassionate, realistic view of safer sex and condom use. Like any voyage, the first step is the hardest, but those of us in the Church hope and pray that our leaders will have the courage to undertake this pil…
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…ith someone who said that he was a witch. The problem is, when it comes to use of the word “witch,” real witches can be nearly as varied as those of novels, movies, and television. Most vocal in their use of the term are segments of the pagan Wiccan communities. Among contemporary Wiccans there is often (following the logic of identity politics) an effort to reclaim the term “witch” as meaning exclusively those of their nature-revering, goddess-ro…
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…Schedule 1, which classifies them as having “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” In light of such classification, suggesting that psychedelics might have a religious use seems anathema. The past few times I’ve taught the course, however, I’ve noticed that students seem more receptive to the idea. I know that it’s an anecdotal observation, but it tracks with a growing interest in the potential medicinal and spiritual…
Read More…f wedlock, public support of or homosexual lifestyle, public support of or use of abortion, public support of or use of a surrogate mother, public support of or use of in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination, public membership in organizations whose mission and message are incompatible with Catholic doctrine or morals, and/or flagrant deceit or dishonesty.” The new contract is “doubled in size and is strikingly different from previous Ar…
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…] community that could potentially, and in the Branch Davidian case did, cause harm to children instead of saving them from harm.” The use of the term provokes specific reactions, and those reactions often include state violence against the people we claim to want to protect. All of this is important, because when I say the ~Negative48 group, based in Dallas, surrounding Michael Protzman, is a cult, I do so knowing full well the problematic baggag…
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