Religion Dispatches
…an abstraction. Now my own family is celebrating both racial and religious diversity. Most of my children still practice as Muslims but at least one daughter practices Christianity now. My grandchildren have Jewish, Rasta, Muslim, white, black, and Native American grandparents. All three boys are blue-eyed and two of them are blond. I cannot imagine a world without this diversity. Last night I took part in a Sukkot celebration at a local synagogue…
Read More…mble understanding (not knowing and certainly not yaqin, certainty) of the Divine. I went beyond just my own personal terms. It was a nice to have this personal sense that God made a difference to me, and therefore that I made a difference to God. I know now, that I do not. But in knowing this, knowing that I do make a difference to God, the mandate to make an even greater difference to humanity became all the more important. It is not only impera…
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…me? Why am I peeking into these windowless bedrooms at middle-aged, middle-class blondes in fuzzy slippers and sweats? Why am I spending an hour of my life watching a middle-aged advertising salesman in suburban Utah standing there in the predawn hours in his sweats explaining where he keeps his clothes? And perhaps because I’m tuned in on assignment as a religion columnist I’m disappointed by the near absence of religion in the episode. Early in…
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…ut mouths shut.” Inside the One News Now Newsroom The AFA’s radio and news division, in particular, said Martin, had become a place where authority could not be questioned, and where the “news” was nothing more than a mouthpiece for conservative “sources” whose views were portrayed as fact. (The Values Voter Summit award citation to Wildmon described One News Now as a “respected online news service.”) And those views were extreme, even by Martin’s…
Read More…mented for years. “He was threatened to get beat up every day,” friend and classmate Nick Hughes said. “Sometimes in classes, kids would act like they were going to punch him and stuff and push him. Some people at school called him names,” Hughes said, saying most of those names questioned Lucas’ sexual orientation. And just to show that bullying isn’t merely a high school problem, there’s news of a Rutgers University freshman who killed himself a…
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…of Biblical Law for his programs if it weren’t for their disagreement over divorce. In his post, Wilson focuses too much on the issue of the capital offenses for which some Reconstructionists advocate stoning. That emphasis favors sensationalism over more pressing issues in our political culture — like the fact that this wing of the home school and Christian school movements wants to eliminate public education by replacing it. In the meantime, the…
Read More…os Angeles, she recalled, would sometimes reach out to feel her head for horns. Late in her life, she and I talked about homosexuality—we talked about everything—and she recalled back in the 1950s a boy who grew up on her block in her middle-class Los Angeles suburb, a child who she always knew was different, and kindly she asked, “I wonder what has happened to him? I wonder if everything turned out okay for him?” Kindness was the core of her Morm…
Read More…xcitement go along with performing the major ritual. I do remember that skydiving tandem was indeed exciting enough that it was actually counterproductive that I had taken the class so I could go free-jump. It made so much sense when she described it that way. But then, I guess she didn’t know how much I worry about things like mosquitoes and hangnails. The type-A perfectionist in me not only craves a correct performance, but also a transformative…
Read More…k alongside with or provide ecclesiastical and personal support to working-class Latino Mormon immigrant families. And many have benefited personally and financially from the underpaid immigrant labor that has refigured California’s economy. Complicated relationships, difficult questions, and few easy answers: immigration reform will take, as LDS Church leaders pointed out in an offical statement last week, “the best thinking and goodwill of all a…
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…grace is a very important political concept. Just as grace reminds us as individuals that there is nothing we can do to earn the love of God—that it is simply poured out upon us—so too it reminds us that at a political level, the minute we start constructing political structures that we think are unambiguously right, we are making our own politics into God. Nobody does that more than Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck calls for context at the beginning of his…
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