Religion Dispatches
…n, although it hasn’t reached the 50% threshold. • ‘It’s not easy’ for African-American Christians who don’t support Obama: J. Lee Grady, the editor of Charismamagazine, has written an interesting, albeit mostly anecdotal, column about the travails of African Americans that are not voting for Obama. “It’s not easy to go against the flow when it seems that the entire black community is marching in lockstep with the well-financed Obama machine,” wri…
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…ation or gender identity. And only one of the three employers in Tuesday’s cases came close to claiming religious motivations: R.G. and G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, which fired Aimee Stephens when she announced to her colleagues that she would be transitioning to live as a woman. Owner Tom Rost is a “devout Christian,” a former deacon at his Baptist church, and claimed that he would have violated the tenets of his faith had he continued to employ St…
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…nts—on “WaffleGate,” the selling of boxes of “Obama Waffles” with a racist caricature of Obama, at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit, see Chip Berlet’s post at Daily Kos titled “Obama Waffles Denounced but Conference Content Ignored” and Sarah Pulliam’s report at Christianity Today. Movie teasers: Billy: The Early Years of Billy Graham is coming to “select theaters across the country” starting October 10. Bill Maher’s Religulous (w…
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…Who Disagreed With Me”). According to star Kevin Sorbo, the DVD of God’s Not Dead will have an interactive feature referencing 37 real-life court cases of universities battling Christian students. Can’t wait for that one. Via Buzzfeed’s Adam B. Vary, here’s a chart of Biblical movie box office numbers. “Biblical movie” is liberally defined here, but it’s interesting to note the difference between now and the “golden age” of Biblical epics (1949-19…
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…ts must be made to enforce it. In the April 2007 priesthood session, a musical number was provided by a men’s chorus. The chorus was selected and trained by Brigham Young University professor Rosalind Hall, who also chose the music for the choir—but Hall was not allowed to attend the performance; instead, she was replaced by a male colleague, Ronald Staheli, for that one event. In fact, Hall was not even allowed to be in the conference hall to hea…
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…me the ’60s washed out and the ’70s rolled around, the Dead’s home base of San Francisco was awash in young women with venereal disease, heroin addiction, and mental health issues. The children who came out of these times know the dark side of hippie sexism better than anyone else. I don’t doubt that some of the Dead’s kids and various ex-wives have stories to tell. Plenty of my friends who grew up in Deadhead families do. But the Sugar Magnolia o…
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…nst the mayor for having refused the order from the Supreme Court. From UT San Diego: Victor Fernando Urias Amparo, 37, and Victor Manuel Aguirre Espinoza, 43, took their vows amid a crush of media and supporters outside Mexicali City Hall. “Yes we could, yes we could,” the crowd cheered in Spanish. The impromptu wedding ceremony came as a surprise to the pair, who had come to City Hall on Saturday morning to participate in a gay rights demonstrat…
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…just prefers to funnel it through one channel, namely customer service, because then they can have stricter rules, what is given, how much is given, under what circumstances, and so on. There are larger social problems than missed flights, like racist policing or the legacy of segregated housing. Major events and systemic problems are very difficult for us to understand and attribute blame to. How could the psychology of blame help us to be savvi…
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…oommate over a period of months in 1970. Although I can’t find an official number, a casino employee tells us over 5,000 tickets have been sold; 5,000 pilgrims who’ve made the trek from around the country to pay their respects to Annabelle, and are willing to wait hours to do so. On the convention floor, an eclectic group of vendors hocks their wares, from Ouija boards and books about ghost hunting to bath bombs shaped like horror movie icons. The…
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…ming they’re involved in religious education is a slippery slope. In 2015, San Francisco archbishop Salvatore Cordileone garnered national criticism for attempting to do just that in the San Francisco diocesan schools, which would have also required teachers to follow a “morality clause,” meaning that they would obey church teachings even outside of the classroom. The San Francisco archdiocese eventually dropped the effort, but reclassifying theol…
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