Religion Dispatches
…erved the massive development of YouTube and Google, the ubiquity of smart phones and mobile devices, and the rise of Facebook and Twitter, which boast nearly a billion and half a billion respectively. For good and for ill, we are available 24/7 for communications via multiple lines of digital contact. Amidst this chaotic stew of interactive entertainment Benedict has worked to figure out, with increasing urgency and frustration, just what the Chu…
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No other end-of-year list can hope to offer such profound juxtapositions: a groundbreaking female Mennonite pastor alongside an “immortalist”; the transcendent wisdom of a civil rights leader alongside one of the most hate-filled religious figures in contemporary memory. But here it is, a connect-the-dots portrait of a powerfully complicated American religious landscape, circa 2014. Vincent Gordon Harding Historian and theologian Vincent Gordon H…
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…married in first month; Lutheran priests barred from officiating More than 800 same-sex couples were married in March after marriage equality went into effect on the first of the month; 770 had already been in civil partnerships. The Lutheran Evangelical Church has decreed that priests are not permitted to marry same-sex couples and some bishops warned that those who do would face “consequences.” From a March 1 story: In spite of the church rulin…
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…Louisiana’s oyster beds have been closed to harvesting, as well as much of Mobile Bay. “I’m waiting for the day when they say no,” she said. So you eat oysters while you can. Before Tammy gets the news that they’re gone. Two young out-of-work geologists sat next to me. They told me that the loss of wildlife now is bad enough. But soon, the oysters will spawn. An inspired oyster feeling the love takes the initiative and begins the dam’s release. Ot…
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…ngary will host the World Congress of Families summit in May. Netherlands: Mobile app designed to help LGBT migrants & refugees Dutch officials have created a mobile app to help LGBT migrants get information on refugee rights and resources and Dutch asylum procedures. Liberia: Essay on ‘tacit tolerance’ and backlash to public pressure for LGBT equality Baba Sillah, a Liberian post-graduate student in the Graduate School of Global Studies at Sophia…
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…“God Loves You Both” On a hot, sunny morning in November, I step into the mobile “pregnancy care” unit parked outside that Planned Parenthood facility. I’m there to meet with Christine Melchor, the executive director of the Houston Coalition for Life, but the nurse staffing the bus, Cheryl Park, tells me Melchor is home sick and offers to show me around the retrofitted bus herself. Park begins where she is sitting in the counseling room, pointing…
Read More…pean_douchebag” wasn’t questioning which game the woman was playing on her phone, he was referencing the abundance of facial hair on the young woman’s face—a nod towards her Sikh beliefs of not altering her body image. Unaware that others around him might practice faiths besides his own, “european_douchebag” posted the picture under the Reddit tab “Funny,” hoping to get an elbow-in-the-side snickering reaction from the online community. But what h…
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…, speculating, and damn, those kids are all doing x, y, and z on their cellphones, and it’s an outrage! Pew’s study of cellphone etiquette gives us one way to begin digging into a much larger set of questions: which norms do we, and should we, place around the use of digital tools? When are these opinions just personal preferences, and when do they take on a more explicit ethical dimension? When should we enforce them? Part of the problem is that…
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…ciety,” he said. CNN traces the start of the backlash to early 2016 when a number of political leaders began making “unprompted attacks on Indonesia’s LGBT community.” It notes that conservative Islam is a growing political force, evident in the arrest and conviction of Jakarta’s Christian governor on blasphemy charges. The report says human rights activists have been disappointed by President Joko Widodo’s “lackluster” defense of LGBT people. Sal…
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…waste American money to buy their expensive oil when we could have our own cheap oil?” “Why is he trying to make rich people poor?” “How is it right to punish rich people for working hard and realizing the American Dream?” It was late on a Friday night and I was tired, so I half-heartedly responded by explaining that there are other factors to consider in every charged question she’d been armed with. But I wondered, “Why the hell was the Salvation…
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