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…entified 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 cultures” then argued that the “so-called Christians” (referring to the…
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…all time and space? When the Cubit recently reached out to Dr. Reiss for a phone interview, though, his answers were surprising. We discussed his methodology, potential applications of his theory to secularism, and Reiss’s own spirituality as a scientist. How does your theory differ from those of past authors that posit just one or two motivations for religion? Ours is based on scientific research, so we ask people what motivates them. At this poi…
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…s inspiration—a Wahhabi version of Islam fomented in the country’s growing number of fundamentalist religious schools—the victims are not necessarily homogenous in their religious beliefs. Attacks in Bangladesh have targeted atheists and apostates, yes, but what victims have generally shared is something more fundamental: a willingness to live according to the dictates of their own consciences, and to pursue an open, pluralistic, and democratic so…
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…d ran a 50-state, all-173-presbytery campaign.” This included church-based phone banks; ads in national Presbyterian magazines; and letter-writing and story-telling campaigns using traditional mail as well as social media [YouTube, Facebook, Twitter]. “We [also] found church leaders who had changed their mind about homosexuality—what they had been taught about the Bible—and shared their stories in these national ads and through social media,” Adee…
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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…xious and afraid, might gather for help. The subways were closed, and cell phone service had gone out. I had no other idea how to find my friends, no idea where else to go. At the very least, I thought I had a responsibility to the Muslim students on campus. (Then again, I really had no idea what to do. I just thought I had to do something, anything, to help.) Walking into our prayer space, which was located inside a Catholic church, I saw a frien…
Read More…t the People’s Party, which held the decisive vote. “I couldn’t turn on my phone when the text bomb hit the ceiling owing to the never-ending messages,” a People’s Party lawmaker said on condition of anonymity. Some lawmakers were summoned by pastors of megachurches in their electoral districts. Lawmakers from the conservative Liberal Korea Party are also working with Christian activists to push an effort to remove protections against discriminati…
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…nts Reform Judaism; Muslims and other non-Christian groups arrive in large numbers. But this is primarily a story of how religion has interacted with some of the big events of American history. American religious expression—its music and art, its stories of internal spiritual quests, its embodiment, its wild profusion of utopian groups, its history of ritual practices—will have to be found elsewhere. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. God…
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…owing same sex marriages, is reaching epic proportions. During a late-July phone call to pastors gathered at more than 200 sites in California, Arizona and Florida— three states with anti-same-sex marriage initiatives 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 g…
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