Religion Dispatches
…Gerson noted in his essay, the number of people who can be labeled in this way would “fit in a phone booth.” (Actually there are significantly more than he recognizes, but I take his point.) My point, though, is that this is the wrong question. Far more interesting, I think, is to look at the influence of Christian Reconstruction; how has it impacted the style of the conservative Christianity that makes up the religious right—which is not to say t…
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…gh some believe Christian never existed. While construction was still underway, Martin and Fendley were accused of perpetuating a hoax, either out of amusement or to promote Fendley’s business. Both men took lie detector tests, which they passed. Sullivan suggests that the hoax rumor may have come from rival granite workers. According to Jim Miles (author of Weird Georgia), shortly after the Guidestones were unveiled, a local minister stated his s…
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…legislation was so vague it could have been interpreted in just about any way whatsoever. Unfortunately, we know which way many of the Catholic West Virginia’s legislators voted. Covert communication and dealings with the coal industry do not protect residents in the coalfields from feeling attacked. Residents of the coalfields know the powerful churches tend to stand with other powerful people, not with them. When Appalachian church hierarchy co…
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…er be licensed to deliver babies at hospitals in any state”; overall, “the number of abortions have increased dramatically.” Everywhere in America, men, women and children are likely to be confronted by, or exposed to, pornography. When the Federal Communications Commission lifted all “restrictions on obscene speech or visual content in radio and television broadcasts,” it freed television programmers to show “explicit portrayals of sexual acts” a…
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…perch in New Jersey, “We’ve always had climate change.” Yup, and we have always had poverty and we have always had disproportionate impacts from what Oxfam calls “Extreme Carbon Emission Inequality.” But we’ve never had climate change that threatened to put the New Jersey Coastline under water for a couple of centuries. I was so glad that the knock-off from the Delacroix painting of the French Revolution won the World Wildlife Federation poster co…
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…r the LGBT community. Businesses and municipal governments are leading the way in many countries. And in Japan, religious institutions “are more approachable than many people realize,” says the story. “Some temples and shrines openly welcome same-sex couples for wedding ceremonies.” For example: Kyoto’s Shunkoin Temple, which dates back more than 400 years, held its first same-sex wedding ceremony in 2010. “Buddhist doctrine isn’t incompatible wit…
Read More…to increasing legal constraints, discrimination and marginalisation. “The way they treat you is like you don’t have any rights, you don’t have any dignity,” said Nisha, 37, dressed in the flowing skirt and long-sleeve shirt favoured by Malaysian Muslim women. But she channelled the fury over her mistreatment into advocacy, and has become the country’s most prominent LGBT activist, despite the personal risk that entails. In March she became the fi…
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…ty and conviction, particularly early movement texts like Mary Pride’s The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality, and Rick and Jan Hess’ Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ, I began to see a vehement anti-feminism and another, startling motivation for large Christian families as well, as the Quiverfull authors told readers that by having very large families, and teaching their children to do the same, they could win the cu…
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…ents. In this story a ruler invests in his servants, giving each of them a number of talents, or money. He then goes away to another kingdom. When he comes back he wants to know what they’ve done with their talents. Some had buried their talents, afraid of losing it. Some had lost the money, wasting their talents. But some had invested wisely and made more money. So the returning ruler rewarded those who had invested wisely and maximized their tal…
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…agement with activities or ideas that their own epoch saw as being in some way magical. Modernity is a myth. The term “modernity” is itself vague. There can, occasionally, be value in vagueness, but “modernity” here rests on an extraordinarily elastic temporality that can be extended heterogeneously and in value-laden ways to different regions and periods more or less at the whim of the theorist . It can also pick out or highlight different proces…
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