Religion Dispatches
…lawsuits against the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage requirement to find a better job. *Correction: This post originally indicated that gender separation was due to concerns about women’s menstrual cycles. To read more about gender separation among Haredi Jews in Israel and in the U.S. read the Forward’s excellent piece from 2011….
Read More…solo? Buddy up through an ad in a local shop or community center. Last minute emergency? Call the airline right away to see about possibilities for accommodating your needs. Likewise, if one is ardently anti-abortion for moral reasons, rather than only focus on making it illegal, prevent it by limiting unwanted pregnancies: help ensure adequate, healthy sex education and contraception are available to those who need or want them. Work to make aff…
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…e too stoned and obsessed with their god Jerry to care. Sometimes, I’d be out in Berkeley at night, coming out of a punk show in some basement or garage, and I’d hear the tail end of a Dead set drifting down from the Greek, always, always, always with the same finale: “Sugar Magnolia.” My friends and I would start roaring with laughter at that “doo doo-doo” chorus, occasionally passing a pedestrian in tie dye or flowy skirts who couldn’t get a tic…
Read More…eaded to Rome. The group did not get a private meeting with Pope Francis, but was given VIP tickets to the pope’s weekly audience in St. Peter’s square. Religion News Service reports that several bishops, including “San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone – point man or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ battle against gay marriage – had written a letter to the Vatican on their behalf.” A group of LGBT Catholics from London who met up…
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…edgy and uncomfortable. I found myself among zealots again, people with shout-outs and slogans and certainty. I could not disappear again so quickly. I wanted my own voice. At last. I wanted to say what I thought, to express what seemed true to me. I couldn’t parrot anyone—not for one more day of my life. I received my assignment: two years in Tunica, Mississippi teaching eighth graders Language Arts. It took me a week to confess I was not going t…
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…elay their abortions, and kept them there, sleeping on cots and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for several days until everyone’s procedures were done. But the belief that the clinic had closed only encouraged the protesters to stay and escalate their tactics, declaring they would make Wichita an “abortion free zone” forever. The summer became a circus, says Bowman, as police, who were initially helpful in escorting patients in, were dir…
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…r court decision that similar laws in Hazleton, Pennsylvania were unconstitutional. The number of deaths have increased even as illegal immigration has fallen dramatically in the past ten years. The economic downturn and high unemployment rates may have deterred immigrants from coming here, both legally and illegally. In addition, the federal government’s stepped-up border patrol forces, combined with local and state crackdowns on illegal immigran…
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…hite supremacy, bolstered by a highly sanitized and selective narrative about the past. But another, sometimes overlooked, function of Confederate monuments was the way they served the cause of “healing.” That is, Confederate monuments stood as trophies of a cheap reconciliation where white people of “both sides” of the war could celebrate each other’s mutual valor. Perhaps they would never agree on who was in the wrong, but for the good of the na…
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…s that remain hidden under the assumptions that BP and Obama exercise absolute control. Nothing could be farther from the truth. For weeks now, in fact, we’ve witnessed their lack of control. Our questioning, then, should shift to why; why aren’t they in control? It Just Happened This brings us to the second interpretation of the oil spill, what I’ll call the ‘Act of God’ theory borrowed from Texas Governor Rick Perry, who boldly suggested that th…
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…can be done by workers who no longer need to report to offices but whose output can be closely monitored remotely. And yes, investors understand that the pandemic will damage or entirely eliminate certain sectors. But that’s okay, too, as long as the Federal Reserve is standing by to provide unlimited long-term assistance to big capital even as the losers drop away. I say all this to make the point that the new normal—with pain and misery at the…
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