Religion Dispatches
…s full of food when rising ground water swamped his basement loaned me his phone. At the bar of a French restaurant that opened the day after the hurricane to serve red wine in plastic cups by candlelight, I learned that the proprietor had recently been convicted of starting a fire in the building during a bout of depression. The hurricane had made things worse, but he was going to lose his business anyway. This man, whom I had just met and who w…
Read More…nywhere. Is anti-Mormonism real? Yes. But even if one poorly-trained rogue phonebanker veered off script into an anti-Mormon ad lib, it does not make for a concerted anti-Mormon effort. (Leave that to orthographically challenged “Heaven is Easy” ministry in Florida.) May cool heads prevail as the race heats up in its final weeks. After all, spinning hearsay into broad anti-Mormon conspiracy in order to tar your political opponents is Mormon baiti…
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…n violently raped repeatedly by a relative should not have access to emergency contraception and should be required, by law, to carry that pregnancy to term.” And then I would like them to list, in detail, the public spending measures that they support which would go directly to her physical and psychological care, her removal from the abuse, the detention of her rapist, and the education and healthcare and nourishment of her child. 5. I would lik…
Read More…the votes of the religiously zealous. No more doublespeak. No more coded encouragements to extremist religious voters. No more breezily righteous jabs at science. Wrote Keller, “I do care if religious doctrine becomes an excuse to exclude my fellow citizens from the rights and protections our country promises. And I care a lot if a candidate is going to be a Trojan horse for a sect that believes it has divine instructions on how we should be gove…
Read More…this weekend that Elder Boyd K. Packer gave a controversial General Conference talk shaming homosexuality. “I have a brother who said to me on the phone last Christmas, ‘Elder Packer says God does not make gays. This is your choice.’ And then he used some very hurtful language with me,” Jahn relates. “I had to hang up on him. But he feels he has been given permission to speak this way by the prophet.” “Even a simple phrase uttered by a General Aut…
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…peal of Taft-Hartley, the 1947 law restricting union organizing, which “truncated us from having any union power.” He pointed at the proposal to reinstate Glass-Steagall as a concrete suggestion that could go a long way toward repairing the economic system. (Glass-Steagall was the 1933 law, repealed in 1999, which mandated the separation of commercial and investment banking activities; its repeal led to the financial services products that were ce…
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…its growing pains, and this was one of them. There have been other racial incidents, including here in Philadelphia. I hope these growing pains will not hamper the momentum of a much-needed counterweight to the 1%. Nathan, you’ve been in New York covering Occupy Wall Street from the beginning, during which time a group called Protest Chaplains has been on the scene; religious groups showed up for the big march on October 6; and the following day’s…
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…hink rather of our own fragilities and failures, our weaknesses, our arrogance and its spectacular irrelevance. For here was a man who thought the world of himself, and was destroyed by himself. It is a good thing he is gone, but all the same a thing to reflect on. For those who rage at dictators should also tremble at any tendency in their direction. I felt uneasy by the way Saddam was executed, at the rushed trial, the incompleteness of the char…
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…with this scene will be overly simplistic and will do little but further encourage a dualistic view of world events: the insidious and increasingly ubiquitous sorting of everyone and everything into the categories of “with us” or “against us.” This perspective is already encouraged by many violent video games and is a pervasive form of interpretation in mainstream news media. Reality is gamified, and games depict reality. Is it any surprise that…
Read More…yees. The Bishops argue that such coverage violates their religious conscience. Yesterday I reported that pro-choice groups expected Obama to side with the Bishops, as does the anti-choice group Democrats for Life. When asked for comment on Jacobson’s report that the administration believes it “owes” the Bishops, a White House spokesperson directed me to the Department of Health and Human Services, which declined to comment. I’ve otherwise been un…
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