Religion Dispatches
…transferred Biko’s courage and tenacity to make Donald Wood (a white journalist I’d never heard of) the story’s hero. This is how I experienced the book The Help. The second false message is this: The really important point of all cultural production and activity is for white agency and dignity to be actualized. The overarching plot of this book presents the narrative of a young white woman finding herself and her voice amidst cliches, circumscrip…
Read More…than pick these findings apart, it might be easier to just go through and list the hypothetical conditions under which that call to DO SOMETHING might actually be compelling: 1. It might be compelling if associations and correlations said anything about causality. But they don’t. If they did, wearing panties would put you at a sharply increased risk for becoming female, and burying yourself in dirt would put you at an increased risk for turning i…
Read More…resses him on a position get stonewalled and badgered? Not fun to watch or listen to, my friends. Not fun at all. Whence cometh the prickliness of Mitt Romney? Eight theses: A. a personality flaw B. a result of having been insulated by class privilege C. a result of developing his leadership style in an LDS institutional culture wherein leaders are expected to appear “flawless” and dissent and open disagreement is not sanctioned D. a consequence o…
Read More…y offensive it is to a Jewish person to see Anne Frank’s name on a similar list—only, this time, one meant to be taken seriously? Finally, though, there’s the weird fact that we Jews are offended by Baptism of the Dead even though we don’t believe in it. I assume none of my fellow Israelites really believe that because someone puts a dead person’s name in a jar, that person is really converted to another religion. In other words, we’re offended b…
Read More…of religious freedom. At the campaign stop, Gingrich, who has been fond of listing executive orders he will sign within hours of becoming president, added a new one to the list. He pledged that he would sign an executive order that would “repeal every aspect of Obama’s anti-religious bias,” a promise which, in true Gingrichian fashion, is sweeping, ridiculous, and impossible. But at his last stand in Florida, the idea of Obama as not only a destro…
Read More
…ing, baby-aborting, and, now, an elderly-killing people, and he used it to promote his own agenda. A false, but oft-heard stereotype of US citizens is that they are all fat. I, willfully, used this stereotype to further my own agenda. Again, I apologize, because I think it is wrong to do so. Someone who is aiming for the highest office in the United States, as Santorum is, should be held to a high moral standard, as the strong historical and curre…
Read More…President of The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, revealed how the witness list reflected only one religious view of the matter when he said the contraception coverage requirement is “very dangerous to religious people with our kind of convictions.” Virginia Democrat Gerald Connolly, a Catholic who last year said a related Issa hearing reminded him of a “latter-day Torquemada” conducting “an inquisition against the secular state,” called today’s h…
Read More…ses the LDS “Family Search” genealogy database today must scroll through a list of policies including the proviso that names of “Jewish Holocaust victims” should not be submitted by non-family members, and then must indicate that they are in keeping with policy when they submit names for proxy rites. But violations continue, and they are a source of great shame and embarrassment. Perhaps more can be done. Listening in on conversations among Mormon…
Read More…ah Cummings (D-MD), the son of two Pentecostal ministers, accused Issa of “promoting a conspiracy theory that the federal government is conducting a ‘war’ on religion.” Cummings added that “The pill has had a profound impact on their well being, far more than any man in this room could know.” Maloney, before she left the hearing, took on Issa in her statement: “What I want to know is, where are the women? I look at this panel, and I don’t see one…
Read More
…but can’t afford them; those who want to marry but are barred by law. The list goes on. Democracy suffers too. The essence of democracy is that we, the people, get to choose our values. We don’t discover them inscribed in the cosmos. So everything must be open to question, to debate, to change. there can be no fixed truth except that everyone has the right to offer a new view. It’s a process without end, whose outcome should never be predictable….
Read More