Religion Dispatches
…xample, did you know that the Cordoba Initiative sent election monitors to Sudan, and Bin Laden was once believed to have been in Sudan? It is a game that trades in absurdity and conspiracy theories. The other approach is to take quotes out of context and use them to prove that the speaker or author is duplicitous. The term for that is now “Sherroding.” Then, finally, is the ever popular and constant smearcasting, where one just hurls mud and hope…
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…Catholic Church hand-picked the gospels that form the Bible as we know it today; omitting the Gospel of Barnabas (among many others) in favor of the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Many biblical texts have begun to surface over time, including those of the Dead Sea and Gnostic Gospels; but this book especially, seems to worry the Vatican. Online speculation, in turn, has sparked renewed press interest. Just this month a he…
Read More…ding up to this year’s election.“ (For more on Pray the Vote, go here) The promo for Craig Detweiler’s new book Into the Dark reads: “Detweiler, a well-respected film expert and media spokesperson on Hollywood and Christianity, examines forty-five twenty-first-century films that resonate theologically—from The Lord of the Rings trilogy to Little Miss Sunshine—offering groundbreaking insight into their scriptural connections and theological applica…
Read More…rs who thinks she’s calling for a return to “our Constitution” while she’s promoting a religious test for public office. I asked if she had actually read the Constitution and she insists that she has, and then asserted that “Obama and his cronies are trying to change everything in it. Including any part about GOD & Country. He is not a Christian. He stated more than once that he was a Muslim.” Christine O’Donnell, as Candace so aptly pointed out,…
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…inciple that imagining creates reality has captivated modern readers,” the promo copy explains. The publisher probably didn’t expect the book to resonate quite so uncomfortably with the political moment when they chose November 8th—Election Day—as its publication date. But indeed, Donald Trump’s distinctive style has roots in the spiritual tradition of which At Your Command and The Secret are both a part. Neville was just ahead of his time. Born i…
Read More…view LGBT people—as purely sexual beings. Foster’s screed is simply a long promo for a new ex-gay movie coming out, and the trailer, three-minutes of nauseating footage, centers around how each of these former homosexuals lived their lives in clubs, engaging in cheap, easy, and often public sex, or were sexually abused. For all the claptrap the religious right yells about how they don’t want to think of us “that way,” the trailer for the film is p…
Read More…positive depictions of LGBT lives. The MDA Free to Air Television Program Code states that “music associated with drugs, alternative lifestyles (e.g. homosexuality) or the worship of the occult or the devil should not be broadcast.” The Free to Air Radio Program Code says “information, themes or subplots on lifestyles such as homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexualism, transsexualism, transvestism, paedophilia and incest should be treated with utmost…
Read More…, and in what manner to express or not express these rights. It’s when the code that translates these rights for us somehow ceases to function properly in the background that problems result. I want to suggest that often when problems crop up around religious or religiously-motivated speech in the United States, they often have less to do with rights per se than with the unwritten code that determines how these rights are to be taken. At least tha…
Read More…mer athletes of color who had a positive experience with BYU and the Honor Code: “If Darron Smith wasn’t so hell bent on exposing BYU, the Church and the honor code office as racists, he’d find out that for every Thomas Stancil, Tico Pringle and Ray Hudson, there’s a Brandon Davies, Reno Mahe and Brian McDonald, the latter of which recovered from an alcohol-related probation, joined the Church and served a mission to Washington, DC.” Sikahema’s fu…
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…interests, for some this incident revealed that the people controlling the code have a lot of power. If one thinks that marketing agents put “Bible” in the code, then they might think of them as predatory, or presumptuous about U.S. Christians and their political affiliations. They might become angry that companies have such power in shaping the public’s perception of Christianity and, indeed, in shaping Christians’ own ideas about their communiti…
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