Religion Dispatches
…force us to leave,” Robertson concluded. “I felt the full weight of their fear, and where there is such fear, we can be certain that there is no possibility of love. Phone calls and an email inquiry to representatives of the Southern Baptist Convention were not returned….
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…ia. Its occupant, a tall blonde Venusian named Orthon, promised to help Adamski save the human race from self-destruction, and by the mid-1950s Adamski’s books were selling thousands of copies and inspiring conventions across the world. But as the Cold War heated up, Adamski’s optimism seemed increasingly naïve. In 1952, concerned enough to take this sort of thing seriously, the Air Force began Project Blue Book, an investigation designed to deter…
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…Grozny before this year’s purge against gay men. Bula, handed me his cell phone, showing me a picture of himself with a broken nose and a black eye. “This happened in Moscow where I was hiding after I fled from Grozny. I was attacked by two Chechens who came to look for me. After that I escaped to Western Europe in 2016.” Even then, the threats continued. “A few days ago,” Bula said, “the police came to my parent’s house in Chechnya. They demande…
Read More…ns in September alone. On Sept. 11, one of Porto Alegre’s biggest art museums made the decision to close a queer art exhibition following a barrage of threats from right-wing protesters, who also harassed museumgoers. Among their claims, protesters from the evangelical-backed Movimento Brasil Livre say the exhibition promoted pedophilia, blasphemy and bestiality. Although the ruling and the museum closure were both bloodless, they represent a subt…
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…ight stories high. The caption at the bottom of the screen says, “The Muslims come to watch the application of the law.” The text accompanying one photograph refers to a prison as “one of Lot’s people.” According to Vice, “The reference is to the biblical inhabitants of Lot’s towns of Sodom and Gomorrah, whose people sinned and were punished by God in the Old Testament for committing sexually deviant acts.” The execution of the gay men was part of…
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…am one of the religious leaders in this country who has one of the largest numbers of black gay churches in the U.S. gathered together. I don’t know anybody that has a larger number of black gay churches meeting together. Not gay churches—the MCC definitely has the corner on that. Do you work together? Very closely. In fact I have an MCC credential, an ordination. Were there times in your life when you did question your ability to stay in the chu…
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…g the data but they go along with the lie. But I was also writing it for a number of people having these doubts who needed some data. What I’m saying isn’t brand new, but it’s saying, “Come on folks, let’s be honest about this.” You lead the moral vision of the book with a challenge to protect the environment. Was that intentional? I think that it opens people to the things that disturb them theologically. There is a growing sense that the wreckin…
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…athematics exam. Others were less likely to let a classmate use their cell phone. “Some philosophical analyses may conclude that a fatalistic determinism is compatible with highly ethical behavior,” the psychologist Jesse Bering comments in an article on these studies, “but the present results suggest that many laypersons do not yet appreciate that possibility.” Theologians have proposed that science still allows faith in a “God of the gaps,” who…
Read More…ignoring the distinctly different political contexts. Another identified himself as a Christian of a distinct stripe by advocating burning phone books that advertise abortion and then said he doesn’t have a Qur’an but if he did he would “feed it page by page to (his) goat who would be impervious to its lies.” He then admitted he’d not read the Qur’an because he “doesn’t read fiction.” Another who insisted he didn’t “hate other religions or culture…
Read More…inherited. That seems a bit odd. Likewise, more families contain both Muslims and non-Muslims in these times (Obama being the most talked-about example). No one in my family is Muslim. Yet over almost four decades they have not rejected me, or prevented me from making my choice or from practicing. They have respected me, and I have respected them. Some are practicing Christians and, as I said, my father was a Methodist minister. It’s all in the fa…
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