Religion Dispatches
…ge of “the body of Christ” in relation to the Eucharist, Luther could be almo*]}*st cavalier about bodily functions, sexual functions among them. That said, Luther never wavered in his polemical resistance to any cultural accommodation of the church to the world. What I was suggesting was that careful attention to the rhetoric deployed by Reverend Young to sell his Christian “sexperiment” illustrates just how far evangelical Christianity has moved in…
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…confusing, story hit the international wires a few days ago, appearing in most major U.S. newspapers on the first of May. Three inhabitants of the storied Greek island of Lesbos, two women and a man, have taken a gay rights organization to court, objecting to the use of the term ‘lesbian’ in the organization’s title: “The Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece.” As plaintiff Dimitris Lambrou put it: “Our geographical designation has been usur…
Read More…dn’t even be necessary to say any of this, obviously. That’s the part that most sickens: the absence of a community of active and intelligent and spirit-filled resistance, the sense that everyone is making sure their bed corners are properly turned down, the faint sound of heels clicking. Given gruesome past instances of prying, spying, and coercion of the conscience by state actors over centuries, one might imagine that American religious leader…
Read More…is not among the above mentioned “non-negotiables.” There is a way in which it would be wonderful to have on the Court a progressive Catholic. I get so discouraged each time I see a press report of a five-four decision as most of the time it is a bad decision for social justice and human rights, for personal freedom. And most often the five votes are the Catholic boys. But in the name of religious diversity, it’s time for a non Catholic….
Read More…zers, seem hellbent on making religion look dumb. Carl Sagan, arguably the most successful of all such popularizers, was located firmly in that camp. When invited to give the Gifford Lectures in 1985, he deliberately turned William James’s famous lecture course upside down, titling his reflections “The Varieties of Scientific [not Religious] Experience.” Science, Sagan suggested not-so-subtly, was the new religion. That was nearly 25 years ago. Wh…
Read More…lly imagine. And George Will, who is nothing if not doggedly consistent in most of his political commitments, has done an elegant job of exploring and explaining the close connection between baseball and democracy. The best team in the major leagues, Will reminds us, will lose nearly half of its games. Baseball is an exhausting thing to care about, a continual source of heartbreak, an elaborate choreography of loss, and a sentimental education in…
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…bate is nothing new. “The decisions of the 2019 General Conference for the most part did not add much discriminatory language to the Book of Discipline,” they said. “That language has been there since the 1970s, when it was added at the 1972 General Conference.” Even back then, Rebecca says, there were many individual Methodist churches that affirmed LGBTQ people, so many Methodists fought against adding anti-LGBTQ language to the Book of Discipli…
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Yes, there are times when the wildest idea, the most obviously impossible scheme, becomes so strongly planted in one’s mind that one begins to regard it as something quite realizeable. Moreover, if that thought is combined with a powerful and passionate desire, at certain moments it will loom as something fateful, inevitable, predestined, as something that cannot fail to happen. Perhaps this feeling is due to a combination of premonition, enormou…
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…, single mother in Connecticut, James converted to Mormonism. She then led most of her family members on a cross-country trek to join with the Mormons in Nauvoo, Illinois. There, she befriended and lived with Joseph Smith, Jr. and his wife Emma Hale Smith. After Smith’s assassination, James was a member of the first wave of pioneers to Utah in 1847 where she remained a faithful member of the church until her death in 1908. Yet by the time she died…
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…oted in John Soloma’s Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth For most Americans, the death of Paul Weyrich will not resonate; after all, most Americans have probably never heard of the man. He wasn’t a dashing celebrity, a sports star, a captain of industry, or a prominent public political figure; he wasn’t a regular guest on the premier talking-head TV programs; he never held elected office; there was no hint of a Ted Haggard/Newt Gingr…
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