Religion Dispatches
…ot. After that, he stayed more often after class, one day whipping out his phone to show me a photo of a white supremacist leader standing up in a convertible during what was obviously a white pride parade. The red-faced, fist waving man in the picture was flanked by two little girls sitting in the back seat, arms crossed with very pronounced frowns on their faces. “They don’t look all that happy,” I remarked to my student. “Those are my daughters…
Read More…el on LGBT Rights This week a Ugandan LGBT rights activist Clare Byarugaba participated in a panel at an Amnesty International USA national conference in Chicago. Other panelists included All Out co-foounder Andre Banks and Chicago transgender educator Trian Alexander. According to a report in the Windy City Times, Byarugabe said, “I don’t feel safe in my own country. Our leaders have sanctioned homophobia and intolerance of the LGBT community. [O…
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…’m really a nobody,” wrote one woman. “Just a stay at home mom who doesn’t particularly go out of her way to take up too much space on the internet.” Whether or not these formal and informal disciplinary actions have been ordered by Church headquarters in Salt Lake City has been the subject of speculation; Church officials deny high-level coordination. But it’s also being reported that the stage may have been set for Kelly’s excommunication court…
Read More…cedented attention. Mayor Mick Cornett has already received 450 emails and phone calls opposing the event. Archbishop Paul Coakley has also condemned the event and called on Catholics to protest if it moves forward. Daniels, naturally, has expressed delight that his antics are finally provoking Church officials. This newfound energy has nothing to do with Daniels and everything to do with the events of last May. An online petition features footage…
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…espite good intentions, it was somewhat off-putting when Frank Weathers at Patheos described Foley as a Christian martyr in his death. Not only because he was killed explicitly for his nationality and not for his religion, but also because the prospect of the hellscape that is the battleground on which ISIS fights becoming a destination for competitive martyrdom can do no one any good. In the absence of any evidence, we cannot know whether James F…
Read More…n founded the United States as an explicitly Christian nation. There was a palpable cognitive dissonance as constituents tried to formulate legal arguments that reconciled their ideas of America as both a Christian nation based on Mosaic law and a nation that guarantees religious freedom, which resulted in such statements as: Yes, people have a choice as to what they want to believe and yet we need to make that “choosing” as easy as possible to ch…
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…. And yet legal claims often assume that these two categories are neatly separate. Partly because of this assumption, the “religion or insanity” question often amounts to a game of “heads I win, tails you lose,” in which whatever interests are more established get to make the rules as they go along. There is a larger pattern in which deviant religious groups are deemed insane when they invoke their religious rights while deviant criminals are deem…
Read More…ren,”—the Haitian name for the Yoruba sea goddess Yemaja. The ceremony was partly to apologize to the goddess for damage caused by the BP oil spill of 2010, and partly to seek her guidance in finding better forms of water management. Unlike private services like blessings and divination, invoking La Siren for a symposium on water management is an eminently social and even political act. Glassman explained, “As a priestess, it’s my work to bring ba…
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…ew up in a household with four sons and three of us became priests. That’s part of my story and its still part of my thinking. My moral creed for all Christians does not require belief in a god; there’s a whole cultural development that’s very dependent on Judaism and it’s something that I treasure. Many of my sensitivities are still rooted in that tradition. This is a book called “Christianity Without God” but instead of the Gospels, you use the…
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…st never true. If you simply open Veronica Lueken’s prophecies to a random page and read about Freemasons and UFOs, it’s easy to assume that all Baysiders are paranoid and hysterical. But when I did my ethnography I found that most Baysiders were pleasant, reasonable people. I also found that Baysiders exerted a lot of agency in terms of what they believed and how they practiced. Some seemed more interested in conspiracy theories about the Vatican…
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