Religion Dispatches
…ernet technological and capacity innovation before the advent of the smart phone. And if we want to start a serious conversation about where presidential candidates get their money and how ethical that money is, let’s do it. I have a laundry list of labor, environmental, feminist, and human rights issues with multinational corporations I’d love to start working through. But don’t give me a thin, opportunistic connect-the-Mormon-dots story and pr…
Read More
…posed.’ How is that different from lying? If one day she tells people she’s 15 and pregnant by a 23-year-old, and another day she tells people she’s 13 and pregnant by a 31-year-old, how is that not lying?” (Arguably, Rose’s most creative defender in that thread was JLS, who speculated that “perhaps Lila Rose was speaking in parables.”) It happened here, a year earlier, at Rebelution—which is evangelical in flavor, affiliated with the Household of…
Read More
…or exhorted on homosexuals to repent or be punished by God before the microphone was snatched away one of Kato’s supporters. It might have seemed that the last person the activist’s friends would turn to for support at the moment would be another religious leader. Especially given that the church in Uganda was at the head of the drive for the draconian anti-homosexuality bill still pending in Parliament. But 79-year-old Bishop Christopher Senyonjo…
Read More…and within days an official at LDS Church headquarters placed a concerned phone call to Melanie S.’s local clergy. Three times her bishop met with Melanie to discuss the video. Because she had affiliated with “Mormons for Marriage,” he questioned whether or not Melanie and her husband should be allowed to keep their temple recommends—certificates that allow the most worthy and devoted Mormons to participate in the faith’s sacred temple rites. Nor…
Read More
…ral Social Survey. From the nineties to the ‘aughties that number rose from 16% to 21%—more than one in five Americans. Meanwhile the GOP has, since January, been busy trying to shrink the very definition of rape to only deem those who suffered “forcible rape” eligible to receive federal funding for an abortion. Forcible. Not statutory rape. These are the kinds of distinctions they find it crucial to draw. What, you thought they’d give up after…
Read More
…Revolutionary era, evangelical Christianity was at a relative low point. In 1780, few could have predicted the explosion of democratic Christianity that would so deeply imprint American culture by the 1830s, replacing Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a secular rationalist Republic with something more akin to a Methodist millennium. A more critical examination might have also told the story, from the underside of that millennium, that while American ide…
Read More…nty, thought crime, much?) The ACLU submitted an amicus curiae brief to the 19th District Court in defense of Jones’ right to protest, which says, “If the First Amendment has any meaning, it is that the government cannot suppress the free speech because it — or anyone else — disagrees with the speech.” The Thomas More Law Center has pledged to file a suit on Jones’ behalf. By the way, I’ve seen TMLC in action. Its lawyers defended the Dover school…
Read More
…ve been far more effective, and supported with a more widespread moral and spiritual consensus. What brought down the tyrants in Egypt and Tunisia, as it turned out, was about as far from jihad as one could imagine. It was a series of massive nonviolent movements of largely middle class and relatively young professionals who organized their protests through Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of electronic social networking. There was also a reli…
Read More
…us as “Christian music artist,” she became the genre’s biggest star between 1998 and 2002, when—citing burnout—she walked away from the industry. Eight years later, Knapp returned with a mainstream rock album called Letting Go. And she came out publicly as a lesbian [as Douglas Harrison covered at that time, here on RD –Eds.]. Recently, I caught up with Knapp to discuss what motivated her to return to music and what she struggles with being both g…
Read More…anization for Marriage (NOM) urgently called on its supporters to get more phone calls into Senate offices. NOM is urging Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos to use his power to keep marriage from coming to the floor for a vote. Meanwhile, Archbishop Timothy Dolan is getting increasingly shrill in his efforts to stop the shift toward equality. This week, on his official blog, he wrote: “Last time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we are living in N…
Read More