Religion Dispatches
…love and acceptance back to their home congregations.” This summer, Mormons are organizing to walk in eight additional Pride parades in Seattle, Portland, Boise, Cleveland, San Diego, Washington, D.C., and New York City. ….
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…enemy. They can see the plans of God. And then they are translating those plans of God into language for the church. And the apostles are the generals. This whole structure is centered around the idea of spiritual warfare—with these apostle-generals leading the armies of God in an existential battle against the forces of evil: Sheets will even say: If we only had pastors, the church would never kill anybody—because it’s all about battle. So genera…
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…may not yield as reliable of estimates as probability samples taken over a phone or another method. That is, we tend to be somewhat skeptical of population estimates produced by such data.” Asked what they thought the purpose of the 2020 State of Theology Survey might be, and whether it might be geared toward driving evangelicals to the polls, Whitehead replied, “I do think there is a particular narrative that they are trying to push with this res…
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…lm festival to cancel the event after death and arson threats were made by phone and social media. According to Reuter’s Makini Brice, “A senator added to the pressure to cancel the Massimadi festival, saying it would promote homosexuality and that impoverished Haiti had other priorities.” Australia: Poll confirms majority support for marriage equality, rejection of plebiscite A new poll released this week that most Australians support marriage eq…
Read More…rt, to function as dramatic plays for attention or celebrity status. The Orlando nightclub shooter reportedly checked his phone for news about the shooting during the actual event; the man who murdered hostages at the Hyper Cacher kosher grocery store in Paris last year filmed the attack on a GoPro camera (in that light, the company’s slogan, Be a HERO, seems chilling). It would be wrong to ignore these shooters—their acts have enormous consequenc…
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…intentions. I managed to drop that daughter off just in time to head to Oakland as I had told my middle daughter I would. She needed assistance with the baby because her Canadian in-laws gave her a car, which had to be cleared at customs before local registration. Then we went to the farmers’ market, the flea markets, and the swap meet. She insists on using a baby carrier instead of a stroller. So I held her six-month-old while she pillaged throug…
Read More…t Coke and a dozen pink-frosted sugar cookies that there is no anti-Mormon phonebanking script in use by Catholics for Obama. Anywhere. Is anti-Mormonism real? Yes. But even if one poorly-trained rogue phonebanker veered off script into an anti-Mormon ad lib, it does not make for a concerted anti-Mormon effort. (Leave that to orthographically challenged “Heaven is Easy” ministry in Florida.) May cool heads prevail as the race heats up in its fina…
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…religiously-motivated pogroms afterwards. A few weeks ago, I spoke on the phone with a leader of New York City’s Bangladeshi Hindu community, who was extremely resistant to making the connection between the persecution of his fellow Hindus in Bangladesh and the persecution of Muslims in India. He insisted, “Please don’t tell me about India. I only want to focus on my people, Hindus in Bangladesh.” I suggested that there was folly in focusing on t…
Read More…l, where we kids would serve as runners, hustling pledge cards between the phone banks and the clerks in the service of CJP’s massive fundraising operation. And my mother was always going off to some BJE meeting or another, which I knew had something to do with the ethno-religious education we were receiving, whether in parochial school or at the synagogue. It’s only later on in life that people, if they take an interest, begin to comprehend the n…
Read More…t world polluters will pay in repentance and compensation for warming the planet. They also have to do with gender equality and refugee status. Why omit these matters? Because there is a fantasy we can deal with climate without dealing with it justly. The illegal sit-ins have started and they are imaginative and fierce—insisting that the global climate emergency needs to trump France’s state of emergency. Back to the prayer: “God grant me the sere…
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