Religion Dispatches
…est Bible student turn back.” Genealogies are “boring” and “difficult”—because we can’t use them. But they were recorded and preserved with such care because the strangers who wrote that book could use them. For the huge majority of human history, they were the measure of a man’s life. They bound you to your history and your land; they gave you a place among cousins, grandparents, sprawling generations of ancestors, in a rooted institution radical…
Read More…gn, Kenyan Archbishop Peter Kairo said, “As the Catholic Church we are not promoting use of condoms. I don’t agree with the advertisements on the billboards and newspapers that say Catholics believe in sex which is sacred and that they believe in using condoms.” “The hierarchy’s ill informed war against condoms goes on,” said O’Brien, who noted that these same bishops “are very often involved in the administration of Catholic charities, who take m…
Read More…erity inquiry. It seems ridiculous to us that a religion could require the use of meth, but there is nothing new about the use of intoxicating substances as a means of facilitating communion with the divine. And in a religion like Wicca, without a central authority (like the Pope, for instance), how do we determine that the use of meth is not in fact central to this particular Wiccan’s religious exercise? I’m not suggesting we can’t determine that…
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…istration subscribe, and which influences the Ralph Drollinger-led White House Bible study (Capitol Ministries) that Sessions attended one day prior to his announcement. The worldview behind the Romans 13 controversy is the ideology of Reconstructionist Christianity as interpreted by Focus on the Family, the conservative Christian media empire founded by James Dobson. Ralph Drollinger’s wife Danielle worked for Focus in the early 1990s and Dobson…
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…the clearest and most present danger for LGBT Americans, particularly because it exemplifies the ways in which the bedrock principle of “religious freedom” has been weaponized to block the advance of LGBT equality. When FADA was first introduced by Idaho Rep. Raul Labrador introduced in July 2015, it garnered 172 co-sponsors in the House. All of them were Republicans. The bill stalled in the Democrat-controlled Senate, and Labrador even attempted…
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…umstances, their only option to address active addiction is to confess their powerlessness before they can be part of a community of recovery. But surely there are other spiritual journeys they can embark upon. What would a spirituality of recovery from chaotic alcohol or drug use look like if it were grounded in the theological claim that God has a preferential concern for the drug user? How would the kinds of practices that would arise out of th…
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…ecial operations are particularly attractive to right-wing extremists, because they feel safe there, they have a structure, and because they can live out their beliefs that they’re better than everyone else. It makes sense to check closely that you don’t recruit the wrong people for this. But there’s another problem when you consider a unit like the KSK: You’re asking the people in it to do extreme things (…) Officers told me ‘you can’t be surpris…
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…nfession with a priest. However, it has seemed easy enough for the average user to misunderstand the developers’ intention that the app be used as an incentive to go to church. Indeed, enough that Vatican officials were moved to issue a statement yesterday making clear that use of the Confession app—or any technological devise—cannot substitute for the sacrament properly offered by a Roman Catholic priest. Kreager is quick to affirm the Vatican’s…
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…ith someone who said that he was a witch. The problem is, when it comes to use of the word “witch,” real witches can be nearly as varied as those of novels, movies, and television. Most vocal in their use of the term are segments of the pagan Wiccan communities. Among contemporary Wiccans there is often (following the logic of identity politics) an effort to reclaim the term “witch” as meaning exclusively those of their nature-revering, goddess-ro…
Read More…ive use amongst women of the Kassena-Nankana ethnic group in Ghana. She focuses on a study of contraceptive use and childbearing amongst women who attended evangelical churches: To their amazement, they found that female Christian converts were three times as likely to use family planning as women who retained their traditional African faith, and had significantly smaller families. The churches certainly didn’t promote family planning. But, despit…
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