Religion Dispatches
…over this past week whether a letter or a meeting request might be on the way for them too. Over the past few days, I have been getting Facebook messages and phone calls from rank-and-file Mormons not interviewed by the Times relaying that they too have been accosted or called in by their bishops for voicing support for greater equality for women in the church, or same-sex civil marriage rights. “I’m really a nobody,” wrote one woman. “Just a sta…
Read More…entified himself as a Christian of a distinct stripe by advocating burning phone books that advertise abortion and then said he doesn’t have a Qur’an but if he did he would “feed it page by page to (his) goat who would be impervious to its lies.” He then admitted he’d not read the Qur’an because he “doesn’t read fiction.” Another who insisted he didn’t “hate other religions or cultures” then argued that the “so-called Christians” (referring to the…
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…ues, and you look for opportunities to do that. You can do that in secular ways and in religious ways. So religion in a sense competes with secular life for providing people with opportunities to express desires. That’s why it can rise and fall in popularity, because people have free choice. What religious leaders want to do is to address people’s values and to be consistent with their values and to realize that their values are individual. In the…
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…s to die. One of the writers, Ranadipam Basu, was able to reach his mobile phone and post about the attack on Facebook, prompting police to respond and help those attacked to the hospital. They would all survive, though with injuries of varying severity. Sadly, another publisher wounded in a connected attack later that day, Faisal Arefin Deepan, would not survive; he was killed in his office, his body found by his father. Immediately after the att…
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…those whom they deem fit. Amendment 10A is an attempt to provide a “middle way” between two opposing viewpoints—a very Presbyterian impulse, according to Kirby, as the denomination has often sought to find ways to keep people together in the midst of disagreements. In terms of policy, Rev. Carla Pratt Keyes, pastor of Ginter Park Presbyterian Church in Richmond, described an argument she heard during debate in the Presbytery of the James: This am…
Read More…nti-marriage-equality campaign. High-ranking Church leaders even scheduled phone calls with individual members to make the ask in person. Did Church leaders solicit an individual contribution from you to the Yes on 8 campaign or any other anti-marriage-equality initiative? If so, how did you respond? How would you respond in such a situation? 2. Mormonism is an openly patriarchal religious culture—one of the most patriarchal modern cultures on th…
Read More…er violent hate crimes against LGBT people are on the rise: This was not always the case in Bishkek. With its dedicated gay clubs and largely indifferent population, the capital once served as a relatively safe haven for Kyrgyzstan’s LGBT community. But in 2014, the government launched a series of legal reforms that marked a dramatic shift away from the western values that had earned Bishkek a reputation as Central Asia’s most socially liberal cit…
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…: “I’m skeptical about many things, including the notion that government always knows best, and that the people can’t be trusted with the truth. We have statements from the most credible sources – those in a position to know – about a fascinating phenomenon, the nature of which is yet to be determined.” Podesta’s statement simultaneously disparages members of the government who know about UAPs, yet states that government officials “in the know” wi…
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…ng the Reagan and second Bush presidencies. A few other stories find their way in: the Spanish oppress the Puebloans; Jefferson cuts up the Bible, saving only the moral maxims; Rabbi Wise invents Reform Judaism; Muslims and other non-Christian groups arrive in large numbers. But this is primarily a story of how religion has interacted with some of the big events of American history. American religious expression—its music and art, its stories of i…
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…eism are arguably as new to England as Islam? And what happens to the fair number of ethnically English Muslims? They may well see no contradiction between a mosque and St. George’s Cross. They may choose a mosque that is dominated by their own ethnic group, as indeed often happens in the United States. To be clear, of course, these are not points the authors are explicitly claiming to hold to, but examples they use to describe the AltRight genera…
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