Religion Dispatches
…ou need to know to keep on reading? I’d cheerfully watch that man read the phone book. So, when my buddy Rev. El Mundo sent me the link to the comedian’s message, I eagerly clicked on it. I was surprised when I saw this wasn’t a clip of his latest hysterical stand up, but an essay he penned for the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog. The topic of his essay was how he came to be an atheist. The whole piece is here. While there is humor in the pie…
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…ch in support of his gay nephew and gay sister-in-law. “People really felt compelled to come out no matter how miserable. And it was hot.” Meredith Hudson LeSueur, a straight LDS mother of two from Herriman, Utah, started to cry when she arrived at the Mormons Building Bridges meeting spot to find what she described as a “sea of Sunday best and strollers,” including her own—festooned in rainbow streamers. It was important, explained Luana Uluave,…
Read More…lecting sermons from a variety of fantastic preachers, all of which are welcoming and inclusive of gays and lesbians. If I would’ve known my City Council speech would become so popular so fast, we would’ve rushed the publication in order for it to already be available! The working title is Silent No More: Sermons of Welcome and Affirmation. Contributors include Jay Bakker, Christian Piatt, Monica Coleman, Rita Nakashima Brock, as well as several o…
Read More…t Coke and a dozen pink-frosted sugar cookies that there is no anti-Mormon phonebanking script in use by Catholics for Obama. Anywhere. Is anti-Mormonism real? Yes. But even if one poorly-trained rogue phonebanker veered off script into an anti-Mormon ad lib, it does not make for a concerted anti-Mormon effort. (Leave that to orthographically challenged “Heaven is Easy” ministry in Florida.) May cool heads prevail as the race heats up in its fina…
Read More…bilizing religious voices as well. A group of anti-equality pastors held a competing Friday press conference led by Rev. William Owens, whose right-wing Coalition of African American Pastors has called on black Christians to withhold their votes from Obama. Owens said President Obama “sold us out” and called the president “Judas.” He admitted that that National Organization for Marriage was paying his salary, which he said was $20,000. Owens deni…
Read More…ans and 50 percent of the general population identified as “pro-life”; the number of Americans who identified as “pro-choice” hit a record low. But respondents’ opinions on policy issues around abortion had not drastically changed from previous years. Just over half of Americans think abortion should be “legal under certain” circumstances, only 2 percent more people than last year. Meanwhile, 25 percent of Americans (compared to 27 percent in 2011…
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…ion” of modern geology. That was part of their motivations, Morris and Whitcomb realized the shortcomings of what was out there, and they teed up off of that. They went off on an irrational tangent, but had a surprisingly rational foundation for their argument. So do you think if they could recognize modern geology, there’d be hope? Well, as long as you start out with the answer—the flood—and then look for evidence to back it up, no, there’s not r…
Read More…r thing to… do whatever Rep. Kelly thinks he’s doing. I give up. Here, have a video about Basenjis freaking out when a phone rings:…
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…years, other personal rules also fell by the wayside. I began signing off phone calls with Paz de Cristo (Peace of Christ), and exclaiming Graças a Deus (Thanks be to God) when celebrating life’s good fortunes. Though Jesus’ divinity remains a mystery to me, I became increasingly comfortable wishing to others the Peace I knew they’d found in Christ. More than once, I felt an all-too-spiritual tingle as I crescendo-ed in collective song. During ch…
Read More…have been a helpful tidbit for Wills’s column. But if there’s no time for phone calls or web searches, well, at the very least, there are fact-checkers. And here’s a modest proposal for the editors at the New York Review of Books and the New York Times and every other publication that will be running a lot of Mormon content this campaign season but has no Mormons on its editorial staff: Hire a Mormon fact checker. There are a number of advanced g…
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