Religion Dispatches
…tals and so forth. So if one had to bring Boudway’s original analogy up to code, one would have to say this: Imagine you live in a country where the default way to buy food is buying it from your employer. You get a job, and your employer negotiates with companies who in turn have agreements with grocery stores and growers, shipping companies and meat processing plants, and so on. The end result of all this is that you get a card, which you presen…
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…when applied to homosexuality, unhealthy. For our community, “change” is a code word for repression, distortion, and fear. So LGBT people must either abandon repentance or queer it. If we are not to reject it, we must make it our own, make it more complex, set aside its oversimplifications. The good news is that this is a gift to everybody else. Total surrender to heteronomous ethics is unhealthy, period. It may be prescribed by some, but it is al…
Read More…d) will be free to focus on the crucial matter of the latest Dan “Da Vinci Code” Brown adaptation. As of this writing, we are still waiting for advance word on the subject of Obama’s graduation speech. As any professor can tell you, a college commencement address frequently falls into one of three genres. The first strives to inspire with insipid platitudes equal to the occasion. (“Your graduation is a change I can believe in.”) The second ignores…
Read More…terpretation will remember that John’s Revelation was written as a kind of code to an audience hard-pressed by persecution and loss. Few believe that its message was intended to be taken literally—much less as a roadmap to events two millennia in the future—but rather to provide comfort and reassurance to a struggling community. It is a bitter irony therefore to see it taken out of context and used to attack a politician offering a platform of hop…
Read More…ur trans female employee as a woman, which means she’s violating the dress code when she arrives to work wearing clothing that meets your company’s guidelines for women. When she inevitably sues for wrongful termination, you’ll have a federal judge on your side—at least if you live and work in Michigan. That stunning decision is an outlier among current case law, and is likely to be overturned on appeal, says Elizabeth Platt, director of Columbia…
Read More…statistically significant effect” on charitable contributions in those zip codes after a scandal, and not only to Catholic-based charitable organizations. The researchers theorize that perhaps once a person stops attending church, the social pressure to be charitable declines. Interestingly, however, these same individuals mirror the statistical notion that even though an increasing number of Americans consider themselves religiously unaffiliated,…
Read More…imself and his family. At least in those days, the Southern Baptists had a code about divorce, but these days, Southern Baptist churches are routinely led by divorced men—the most famous being Charles Stanley. Despite divorcing his wife in 2000, he remains the pastor at the mega-sized First Baptist Church in Atlanta. Divorce has been a growing problem for the faithful. A Barna poll from 2008 revealed 33 percent of couples overall get divorced. Bor…
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…square will never—and I mean, never—be enough. Not while they continue to promote leaders, policies, and theories that support white supremacy in the nation and encourage the idea that the body of Christ is segregated by race and class. To people of color who have spent centuries being shunned or diminished by white evangelicals, anything less than acknowledgment, and changed behavior, specifically from Bible-toting white men who’ve manipulated s…
Read More…me time. “Islam does criminalise sexuality – that is clear. But Islam also promotes love and peace and no killing and all these human values, so why not go with these instead of violence?” Israel: Orthodox family sues to halt cremation of transgender woman May Peleg, a transgender activist from Jerusalem, committed suicide this month; she expressed a desire in her will to be cremated. But, as she had feared, her ultra-Orthodox family asked a court…
Read More…, New Hampshire, and Iowa) promoting a creationist film called The Genesis Code, and holding fundraising receptions. The moralistic film follows an unbelieving hockey player and a Christian journalism student who struggle with “reconciling their scientific studies and what’s taught in the Bible” as he falls for her and she uses their relationship to “guide” him “toward God.” You can read a “pro-family” review here that warns of sex (kissing) and n…
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