Religion Dispatches
…n’t seem to realize that the kinds of same-sex relations that are going on today are not like same-sex relations at other times in human history. There were always people of the same sex having sexual relations, but today there are new claims. It’s like our proposals for more equality in marriage over and against the patriarchal marriage of the past. Same-sex couples are making claims as families and asking for thing like marriage. Same-sex Muslim…
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…of things. And when I was about to turn 40, I became interested in health promotion and disease prevention from a personal standpoint. As I read recommendations regarding health promotion and good healthy forms of living, it occurred to me that we were in fact reinventing the wheel. All these recommendations and so forth seem to be reiterations of how people were living before agriculture. And then it occurred to me that our genetics have changed…
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…tian lives saved by this groundbreaking book,” comments Christian Feminism Today on its website. An earlier book, Women, Men, and the Bible, attracted widespread attention in 1977, giving hope to women raised in conservative denominations that required women’s submission to men. Mollenkott spoke at two of the first conferences of evangelical feminists: one in 1973 at Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver and another in 1975 to the newly founded E…
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…r now ending — a response much too fixated on the epiphenomenon, as though today’s naked expressions of white nationalism can somehow be separated from the longer career of white supremacy. Making a show of their ethical colors, liberal faith leaders have organized and participated in routinized rituals of personal purification that do absolutely nothing to make the slightest dent in structural oppression. Not all, of course: to say that would be…
Read More…presents the far extreme wing of religious conservative views on evolution today; many other conservative Christians find ways of reconciling the findings of evolutionary science with traditional biblical truth, distressing to Ham as this may be. What unites Ham with the other religious conservatives today is the same kind of Biblicism that united the religious conservatives a century ago: since the bible is indeed the Word of God, the refuge amid…
Read More…eria was Egypt’s fate, or whether something worse is around the corner. In Today’s Zaman, I argued that Pakistan might be the more operative analogy. With weapons flowing in from Qaddafi’s looted cache, plus an army that according to Wikileaks is “no longer capable of combat,” it’s unclear how said military can secure the country, regain control of the Sinai—a thousand times harder after what happened yesterday—or hold its end of the bargain up wi…
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…all elicited a powerful response, with the hashtag trending last night and today and getting the attention of clergy. The church we’d been attending didn’t bother mentioning #Charlottesville on Sunday. As if I needed more reason to not return. #EmptyThePews — Gov. Pappy 🕷 (@GovPappy) August 17, 2017 The trauma of the church accepting his sexual immorality was worse than my sexual assault. I’m in mourning. #emptythepews — Ms Cat. (@catherinemom23)…
Read More…terms like “Obamosque?” Or this photograph on the Special Guests website? Today Special Guests is also promoting the special guest of Scott Wheeler, a long-time operative of right-wing smear campaigns against Democratic candidates and office-holders. Wheeler is the executive director of the National Republican Trust PAC, which during the 2008 presidential campaign ran incendiary ads attempting to link Obama to terrorism. He’s a veteran of other e…
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…story of the women’s movement and feminism to illuminate American troubles today, to recall the longer battle lines drawn amongst women’s organizations on opposing religious and political lines. This absence of feminist thought and contributions is equally evident in debate between science and religion on spiritual experiences, or the neuropsychology of religious experience. Rarely, in these discussions, does one find feminist studies of science o…
Read More…itted same-sex couples to prepare to complete marriage license paperwork. “Today justice won out,” said Samuel M. Chu, Executive Director of California Faith for Equality. “Today’s decision by US District Court Judge Vaughn Walker to overturn Prop 8 and lift the stay on same gender marriages in the state of California on August 18th is a giant step toward equality. “The Supreme Court has affirmed that marriage is a fundamental right. Justice Walke…
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