Religion Dispatches
…llowing religion and politics over the year — the overturning of Prop 8 in California (which continues to be fought in the courts), and the designation of such religious groups as the Family Research Council as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The list is curious, though, because while it may be a list of perceived indignities and injustices visited upon some people who subscribe to a far right idea of Christianity, the list as a wh…
Read More…d Pakistan, which is 98% Muslim. To make matters worse, a local Southern California LDS Church representative who had pledged to join seventy other religious leaders at Friday’s interfaith press conference against Islamaphobia failed to show. Certainly we can do better. Whatever one thinks of the Park51 Islamic community center (and the project is not without problems, as my RD colleague Hussein Rashid pointed out in this must-read piece), M…
Read More…erally 40 years in the making. Too bad I had already made plans to move to California and once again I would be the prodigal sister. Still we made up for lost time and had a relationship like none I have ever had as an adult. I believe I already mentioned that my second of three grandsons was born on the 22nd of December. We shared photos over Facebook that day and the next laughed about her car getting stuck in the DC blizzard on her way to work….
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…ll kill Granny in her sleep. (Wait. I take that back. In the middle of the California desert, I attended a church service in which the pastor preached on the evils of “liberation theology.” Which he said is about Obama wanting to take from the people who have and give to the people who don’t. Which is socialism. Which is a religion. Which is like Satanism. He also said that Americans are the most spoiled people on earth. I’m pretty sure the pastor…
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…none-too-impoverished environs of Macalester College and the University of California at Santa Barbara.) Intentionally or not, one effect is to underplay the importance of economic class as a focus of attention. Can the religious concerns of white working-class Christians (or for that matter the concerns of non-white immigrants, who are predominantly Christian) be valorized as part of ASR’s bold new future? Within the logic of this argument, must…
Read More…t wasn’t Moses who parted the Red Sea. It was just windy. A school superintendent in Wellesley, Massachusetts has apologized for allowing students on a field trip to a local Islamic center to participate in midday prayers. The city of King, North Carolina has decided to remove a Christian flag from a public Veterans Memorial. The ACLU of New Jersey is suing the city of Point Pleasant Beach over the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer at city council m…
Read More…feminists were concentrated in geographical pockets in Boston, or Utah, or California, and those who became visible through their activism or writing became the targets of repression or excommunication. That really changed with the advent of sites like feministmormonhousewives.org, which was launched in 2004. In the blogosphere—we Mormons call it the “bloggernacle,” kind of like “tabernacle”—women who may have once felt isolated in their congregat…
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…n option. The LDS Church’s support for Proposition 8 in 2008, amending the California Constitution to make same-sex marriage illegal, has firmly linked the Mormon church to the issue of gay rights in the minds of people on both sides of the issues. As distressing as the LDS assertion that gay relationships are forbidden by God is to many outside the Church, it is often far more distressing to those inside it. For many years, the church taught that…
Read More…members of the group are back with their families. So is this just another California Story, or something more? For many Pentecostals, hearing from God is an important part of a faith life. In this particular case, the leader of the prayer group, Chica, had gathered some church members for a outside prayer group. A policeman Saturday morning found the group praying outside of a high school “against violence and premarital sex.” Sounds like some sp…
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…organic strawberry farms this morning that caught my eye as I whizzed by. (California is on the left, Australia on the right, in the photos below.) It made me thankful and made me think of my favorite things, in life and in prayer. So I want to share three favorite prayers, one from the Qur’an, one from the hadith and one about the majesty of Allah, also from the Qur’an, but not quite a supplication, it is often repeated after formal prayers in…
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