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…
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…spiritual. There’s an intuitive, cultural, emotive sense that another checklist of items would just perpetuate the wrong way of thinking, the wrong way of being. We don’t need another line, the protests seem to be saying. The kind of change we want is deeper. So, sorry, incrementalists like Jay Michaelson, we’re not going to get practical or endorse a political program. We’re going to do this deeper form of protest, because it’s a deeper kind of p…
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…ved that the survival of his own namesake university depended on its honor code, which mandated not just chasteness and academic honesty, but also that students “practice good health habits and regularly participate in wholesome physical activities.” ORU, like other evangelical universities, does not only enforce negative prohibitions—it also prescribes a positive vision of the “good” student. This prescriptive model—what ORU has called its “whole…
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…certed “Zionist attack.” For those unclear that “Zionist” in some minds is code not for the problematically successful movement toward Jewish self-determination, but rather for the fabled machinations of the Elders of Zion, the speaker continued: “They do not want the church. They are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God killers.” Babini has since denied ownership of these words (though the Guardian noted his leg…
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…aggressive rhetoric is not unique to him. It partly stems from a fundamentalist Christian worldview which is as much of a political movement as it is a religious one. It’s how the 81 percent of “born again” Christians who voted for Trump in 2016 can justify their support of the president’s malicious xenophobia and crude remarks about women while supporting a purity culture that requires abstention from sex and claims to prioritize respect and civi…
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…s well illustrated in the case of Peter Damian, an 11th-century bishop who promoted a harsh asceticism. Among his writings is a treatise that praises self-flagellation as an invaluable means toward repressing the body’s impulses. Sexuality was a deep concern for Damian, who believed that sexual acts were a sacrilege; celibacy and a renunciation of the erotic body was the proper road to Christian perfection. Damian’s hyperbolic language against the…
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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 rhetoric. This mutual support may make for a coherent ethical and moral code and it may help reinforce long-held norms of the way one should live one’s life. There is reason to wonder, however, if it might actually hurt the women and men of Kazangula. If “Abstinence” and “Condoms” are mutually exclusive while “Abstinence” and “Be faithful” present an interconnected coherent picture to which one should aspire, then “ABC” prevention messages may,…
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…eloped world to make our country and continent, the dumping ground for the promotion of all immoral practices, that have continued to debase the purpose of God for man in the area of creation and morality, in their own countries. Honduras: LGBT advocates meet in country plagued by violence The Washington Blade’s Michael Lavers reported this week on the more than 100 people who attended an LGBT equality strategy session in Tegucigalpa, Honduras: Ad…
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…destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies; and to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God. Sounds like a pretty clear mission statement to me. But there’s more. The Wedge Document was based on the strategy laid out by the godfather of the Intelligent Design movement and Discovery Institute advisor Phillip Johnson. In his 1991 book Darwin on Trial, Johnson argued t…
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