Religion Dispatches
…when he was seven years old and living on Endeavor Drive in Corte Madera, California, sat on the sidewalk selling rocks. Not fancy rocks, just plain old bits of the planet. It was his first thought experiment, though he wouldn’t have called it that at the time. Around that same age, Jonathon imagined what it would be like to become an Orthodox Jew, yearning for a way to rebel in a family of moderate Jews. He just barely fumbled through his Bar Mi…
Read More…age rights. This would signal a tactical shift from the Church strategy in California in 2008, when Mormon officials and operatives depicted the legalization of same-sex marriage as a direct threat to Church doctrine and practices and mobilized members in their defense, to a position more like that adopted by the LDS Church in Argentina last summer, when members were not officially deployed or pressured into anti-same-sex marriage political activi…
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…ghts: The Committee’s report compares court challenges to Proposition 8 in California and the federal Defense of Marriage Act to Roe v. Wade and the battle over reproductive rights. This results in a new “pro-family, pro-life” messaging strategy that harms all non-traditional as well as LGBT families. It contributes to the climate that permits bullying and harassment of youth from such families who become at higher risk for depression and suicide….
Read More…ed as a Hill staffer in the 1990s, serving on the staff of Tom Campbell, a California Republican. In the mid-1990s, he said, he approached then-Speaker Newt Gingrich about obtaining a room for the small number of Muslim staffers to hold Friday prayers. Gingrinch granted that request, and the tradition continued through the tenures of Speakers Dennis Hastert, also a Republican, and Nancy Pelosi. Over the years, the number of people attending grew,…
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…. Hernandez, who was trained at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California, and the Mexican-American Catholic College in San Antonio, was also the 2006 recipient of the Archbishop Gomez Pastoral Leadership Award, as a Church leader “whose actions embody Catholic teaching.” At a $100-plate dinner to benefit Centro San Juan, Hernandez was feted by the award’s namesake, Archbishop José H. Gomez of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, as well as Ar…
Read More…in calling for homosexuality to be criminalized. The former head of AFA’s California affiliate and an ally of Fischer’s, Scott Lively, is a purveyor of bogus claims that the Holocaust was perpetrated by gay people. He was one of the chief instigators of religiously-motivated violence and persecution of LGBT people in Uganda after he brought his “gay agenda” conference to Kampala in 2009. Glenn, an early Huckabee supporter when Huckabee was lambas…
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…ientists were all there. People came from all over the country: Louisiana, California, Florida. We drank and ate and discussed our families, our work and our vacations. We rehashed funny and poignant moments from the trial and board meetings. It was a community effort and just as during the trial, everyone played to their strengths. Kevin Padian, who during the trial testified to the wealth of information about evolution in the fossil record, mann…
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…ear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.” Lively, the former head of the California affiliate of the American Family Association, and an ally of the AFA’s virulently anti-gay policy director Bryan Fischer, led a three-day conference that Kaggwa says sparked a “panic” in evangelical and Pentecostal churches that the “gay agenda” was poised to cause the downfall of Ugandan families and culture. During the conference, Lively blamed gay people for t…
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…lo Indians throw off religious oppression by Franciscan priests in Spanish California. I should perhaps admit upfront that I am a “practicing Catholic” of a distinct sort: my grandparents, on one side, and great-grandparents on the other, were poor Irish immigrants. I inherited from them my perspective on US religious history. I cannot deny, though, that many Christians from Europe, Catholics included, treated the native peoples abominably. As God…
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…rs that immigrants and hippies have sprinkled across the hills of Southern California. “Meditation is a science,” she replied. “It’s literally build[ing] your brain. You don’t need the Buddha.” She explained that “my business is geared to people who don’t have a lot of time,” and who “don’t want to feel like they’re doing anything religious.” Both Yalof Schwartz and Rinzler gave similar answers for why their studios exist: to help people slow down…
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