Religion Dispatches
…ated civil liberties and religious freedom advocacy groups with his resistance to their concerns about constitutional problems plaguing the office, is off to teach at New York University and to launch “a new organization to help organizations and local governments partner with faith based organizations,” a White House official told me. Michelle Boorstein at the Washington Post also reports that DuBois also will be writing “a book of devotionals fo…
Read More…invited their teenage daughter Olivia’s friend Frankie over for dinner. Since Olivia has a history of drugs and partying, and since she now wants to be a responsible mom to her infant daughter Eden, Mark and Cheryl want to make sure they know her friends. Particularly Frankie, who is a friend from Olivia’s party days. (I confess I tensed my jaw a bit during the scene when Frankie and Mark discuss their concern for Olivia’s welfare, referring to h…
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…mandatory conscription into the army for the sons. But public discourse since the Tea Party has sunk so low that many of those who objected to the Muslim community center actually known as Park 51 made no distinction between “Arab” and “Muslim”. Just this week, the Dearborn Arab International Festival, an 18-year-old tradition begun to support Arab-owned businesses on a previously neglected Main Street, was cancelled due to escalating tensions br…
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…al protocols and its vision of racialized criminality and institutions of incarceration. I’m calling for a Christianity that no longer provides religious sanction or the cloak of righteousness to the political project of U.S. sovereignty and its vision of who is normal (and in the right place) and who is abnormal (and thus out of place). I’m calling for a Christianity whose animating logic is no longer tied to that false “god-man.” The “god” of (o…
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…ack Obama, and the Alexa character, originally titled “the ex,” seemed to encourage violence against women. Zombification allowed for consumers to act on vengeful fantasies. If they are zombies, violence can’t be wrong, can it? Shooting targets in the face is not real violence, if they are monsters. Zombies Are Us: Humanity and Its Discontents In the first season of The Walking Dead, the protagonist Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) is saved by Morgan…
Read More…hange the Air Force has never denied, which makes the claim that this evidence is “totally at odds with the Air Force’s new official explanation” willfully misleading. From the beginning, the Air Force claimed they moved up Monk’s redeployment when his replacement arrived early, making Monk’s continued presence in his old unit unnecessary and redundant, whereas he was needed in his new unit. Monk has, to the best of my knowledge, not responded to…
Read More…pports this project and feels I am the person to do this and applauds and encourages me, this venture is incompatible with their mission. I knew when I started off on this project there was a possibility this might happen. Sounds like US evangelicalism as practiced on the institutional level cannot support a personal faith quest that doesn’t lead to an embrace of their particular version of God. This does reveal a tear in the fabric a little bit….
Read More…omosexual love is of itself anything else than love, and that therefore, since the essence of the Torah is love, it hardly falls afoul of the law. To be sure, when it is not love, when it is promiscuity, or infidelity to a sworn partner, or rape, or the sexual abuse of minors, or in any way violent, then it is indeed not love, but that is no less true of heterosexuality.” (Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?) Those interested in more technical c…
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…LGBT Nigerians who are seeking asylum in the U.S. and Canada after experience violence in their home country. The article quotes one applicant for asylum saying that hostility to homosexuality is the “only thing that can bring the Muslim and Christian community to sit at one table…two enemies that really want to kill each other can agree on this particular issue.” We noted last month that the Nigerian law has been backed by Roman Catholic Cardina…
Read More…) I find that I wish to renounce my hater status. Instead, if I had the chance to be in the presence of Fred Phelps, I would treat him just as I did this student, with candor and respect—for his humanity, if nothing else. “I don’t feel any animosity from you,” my student once remarked during one of our after-class chats. “Why would you?” I asked him. “You’re a human being just like me. We disagree on a lot of things, but that’s no reason for me to…
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