Religion Dispatches
…courts for more than a decade. We used the internet to regroup and grow in numbers. The Church even developed its own web-based resources to acknowledge and address its own controversies—historic and contemporary. This, we thought, was a good sign. A sign that might not need to fear losing our membership, our place, in a cherished tradition, just for having and voicing questions, doubts, and differences. We told ourselves to not to be afraid. And…
Read More…Americans in favor of religious freedom, including a 93-year-old Northeast Florida civil rights icon, who planned to go and make a citizen’s arrest. But several other callers demonstrated the depth of anti-Muslim hostility. One argued that Islam is inherently violent comparing responses to the planned Qur’an burning in Afghanistan to the responses of American Christians to desecration of their sacred symbols, completely ignoring the distinctly dif…
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…they call them “energy.” I’m talking about values. As a species, we’re motivated to assert our values. When we come to understand how we value the 16 desires, you gain insight into why some aspects of religion resonate more with you than others. Could this be extended to people’s participation in secular communities as well? Is there anything specific to religion about this, or could we apply it more generally to other kinds of collectives? The 16…
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…s to die. One of the writers, Ranadipam Basu, was able to reach his mobile phone and post about the attack on Facebook, prompting police to respond and help those attacked to the hospital. They would all survive, though with injuries of varying severity. Sadly, another publisher wounded in a connected attack later that day, Faisal Arefin Deepan, would not survive; he was killed in his office, his body found by his father. Immediately after the att…
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…one sees amendment 10A as palatable, of course. A statement from the conservative Presbyterians for Renewal declared: “A line has been crossed… We who are committed to holding fast the clear teaching of scripture must pray and work all the more to discern how to move forward with biblical faithfulness in and for a denomination that has lost its way.” Regardless of those reservations, 10A is now the law of Presbyterian land. What lessons can be dra…
Read More…nti-marriage-equality campaign. High-ranking Church leaders even scheduled phone calls with individual members to make the ask in person. Did Church leaders solicit an individual contribution from you to the Yes on 8 campaign or any other anti-marriage-equality initiative? If so, how did you respond? How would you respond in such a situation? 2. Mormonism is an openly patriarchal religious culture—one of the most patriarchal modern cultures on th…
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…hich was located inside a Catholic church, I saw a friend of mine, an observant Jewish student, by himself. Turns out he had wanted to help, too. “What are you doing here?” I asked. (He was, of course, not exactly who I expected to see.) He said, “I figured that some Muslims might feel uncomfortable walking home”—people had already begun to blame any number of extremist Muslim groups, and of course the subways had been shut down—“and that, if I wa…
Read More…sets. But the media can’t be trusted entirely, for it is notorious for its flip-flops. What further deters LGBTQ people is the lack of a network. There are no gay marriage bureaus. Or any gay bars worth their name in Indian cities. Gay parties are not held as frequently as they used to be before, due to police raids. A mere amendment of the law is not going to make things great for us. Rao calls on the Hindu nationalist BJP to look to pre-colonial…
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…akening proclaimed spiritual freedom for all. Anglo-Americans created the evangelical synthesis. They also fostered a racially exclusivist and religiously restrictive culture that limited the freedom of those defined outside the ranks of the free and the citizen. This remained true during the era when America’s God was a republican and providentialist one. American religious history fundamentally has been about this dialectic of religious freedom…
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…iatives on their ballots in November—a handful of nationally known conservative evangelical Christian leaders were tossing around terms like Armageddon and a “blitzkrieg moment.” Pastors in San Diego, the city that has been dubbed “the ground zero of the Christian marriage movement,” in a Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) report, are organizing a massive get-out-the-vote campaign in support of the initiative. Charles Colson, former Watergate…
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