Religion Dispatches
…the move is actually an effort to protect Romney against another round of flak from socially conservative and evangelical voters in Iowa, where the Marriott-porn issue flared up for a brief moment in July 2007. (Back then, Romney even came in for criticism from the LDS Church-owned Deseret News, in an editorial with the unfortunate title “The nasty taint of porn.”) I don’t buy it. Anyone who understands the traction of evangelical anti-Mormon s…
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…”) It happened here, a year earlier, at Rebelution—which is evangelical in flavor, affiliated with the Household of Faith Community Church. Within the first three comments someone (“Bryan”) asked, “Does the end justify the means? Is it all right to lie in order to (at least potentially) incriminate someone else?” Perhaps because of The Rebelution’s readership, Lila Rose’s supporters appealed not to “mental reservation” but to the Bible—likening he…
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…attendance grabbed the activist’s white and gold coffin, which was draped with a rainbow flag, and hauled it themselves to a space between the dark green trees and foliage to be buried. They would have had to bury Kato, who identified as Christian, without a blessing from any member of the clergy had Senyonjo not stepped in. “I believed that it wasn’t right just to dump the body there without prayers. I couldn’t bear it at any cost,” he said late…
Read More…tion you feel you are getting from an honest place?” Is there a place for individual conscience in contemporary Mormonism? How will a global church that stresses uniformity respond to growing political diversity within its membership? Her video—which has now been viewed more than 250,000 times—has certainly restarted that discussion….
Read More…on any side of a controversy when there really is no controversy to begin with—not for the roughly 99.95% of scientists with relevant expertise, anyway. That’s in fact the whole point. In any case, he then recounts a rather nasty disagreement that we had on the phone during the Dover trial back in 2005. I have to admit his recollection is pretty accurate. At one point he said, “How dare you say that we’re stupid.” I told him that I wasn’t calling…
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…tion, and even more easily mustered in support of any proposed military conflict, aggressive or otherwise. One-third of their children are born out of wedlock, and are unemployable by any contemporary industrialized-world standard. Even if we were to bring back their jobs from China and elsewhere — a damned unlikely scenario — they would be competing at a wage scale that would not meet even their basic needs. Low skilled, and with little understan…
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…id she have the kind of consensual hetero sex that is rather like a mobile phone contract with a hidden pregnancy fee buried in the contract? [shrug] Nobody held a gun to her head, so she has no right to complain… or, you know, make her own healthcare decisions. (The crassest versions of this argument are those dazzlingly astute Didn’t want ____? You shouldn’t have had sex! lines of logic that crop up in every mainstream newspaper comment thread a…
Read More…ier for Jones to further fuel misperceptions of Muslims as intolerant of criticism, misperceptions that lead too many Americans to conflate all Muslims with violent extremists….
Read More…things have made me feel so vulnerable and yet so motivated of late. So I will take this with the small wisdoms or the lessons I learned this Ramadan. In no particular order: Although Allah is always present, in the company of conscientious and devout believers, ones experience of that Divine presence is enhanced. This is what the Sufis mean with the idea of suhbah: companionship for the sake of Allah. But, and here’s the thing I got this year: p…
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…way. It’s funny to me, because I think Hauerwas would resist that idea of withdrawing from society very much. He’d say, “No, no, we’re not withdrawing, we’re engaging in a different way.” Walter: But insofar as he appeals to the Mennonite tradition of Yoder, it is to some extent a withdrawal: we don’t participate in the political process. I understand, you maintain another kind of presence, but yeah. Dan: On a certain level Yoder, of course, woul…
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