Religion Dispatches
…king about digital media, Mormonism, and progressive politics this week at Clark University in Massachusetts, exploring the way that digital media has served not only institutional Mormonism but politically progressive and nontraditional Mormons (including Mormons who support LGBT equality) as well. More information about the event (open to the public) and the Clark University “Difficult Dialogues” series on “Religion and Compassion” is here. It w…
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…other landmark text for those searching for alternative histories is Emily Clark’s A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans. I previously interviewed the author of this wonderful work of historical excavation here. Clark’s work comes from the archives of the Afro-Creole Spiritualist group Cercle Harmonique from 1858 to 1877. By focusing on Afro-Creole Spiritualism in New Orleans, we get an extended, as wel…
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…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. Where Pigpen called up the trusty telephone operator, I did my pining alone, with only the camaraderie of a searc…
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…married in first month; Lutheran priests barred from officiating More than 800 same-sex couples were married in March after marriage equality went into effect on the first of the month; 770 had already been in civil partnerships. The Lutheran Evangelical Church has decreed that priests are not permitted to marry same-sex couples and some bishops warned that those who do would face “consequences.” From a March 1 story: In spite of the church rulin…
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No other end-of-year list can hope to offer such profound juxtapositions: a groundbreaking female Mennonite pastor alongside an “immortalist”; the transcendent wisdom of a civil rights leader alongside one of the most hate-filled religious figures in contemporary memory. But here it is, a connect-the-dots portrait of a powerfully complicated American religious landscape, circa 2014. Vincent Gordon Harding Historian and theologian Vincent Gordon H…
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…r “Ripple” conversation, and today, there are hundreds of Dead songs on my phone and dozens of live recordings in playlists, even a nod when I see a Deadhead sticker on a car. I am a relapsed Catholic, and thanks to my friend, I am also a repentant Deadhead. Dear Jesus, let me confess: I even wear Birkenstocks. Shannon. Deadshow, Deadhead. Dominquez Hills, 1990. Photo by ChasM3/https://www.flickr.com/photos/chasm3/ “Sugar Magnolia,” however, still…
Read More…re what was demanded of me, so the day for my flight came and went and the ticket never got used. During that year, a woman read my tea leaves after supper with some of my new friends. If you don’t know how that works, first I drank a cup of tea with leaves still settled at the bottom. Once the liquid is mostly all drunk, the reader takes the leaves, swishes them around in the bottom of the cup, turns the cup upside down and “reads” the tracks and…
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…scoll has had a corner on shock-value pastoring since the emergence of his Seattle-based Mars Hill Church, and his latest book, Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together, co-authored with his wife Grace, is the most recent example of his penchant for the dramatic. The book sparked immediate outrage among Christians, who labeled it too sexy—but the heaviest criticism came from those, Christians and non-Christians alike, who…
Read More…or their LGBT family. I can’t help but think about that lesbian couple in Seattle and their bishop, who tried to do the right thing and now must turn this couple away. The consequence of these policy changes is emotional carnage to individuals and families who simply wish to live as their authentic selves and remain part of a religion they love, but which does not deserve them. My sister, who is a devout Mormon but who also loves me unconditional…
Read More…the particulars of gay sex than of straight sex. “Slacktivist” author Fred Clark went straight for the throat, writing that Anyabwile’s post reads like “excerpts from the World’s Most Awkward Sexter” and describing him as “Clumsily body-phobic,” a “creepy, creepy, creepy voyeur” and more. Anyabwile attempted to defend himself in another lengthy post, saying that he’d been “misrepresented and misinterpreted.” He then equates systemic violence agai…
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