Religion Dispatches
…pic of Islam and homosexuality. The film has won numerous awards including Best Film at the Tri-Continental Film Festival in India and Best Documentary at Turin LGBT Film Festival. The film explores the lives of gay and lesbian Muslims in several different countries, portraying jihad not as a holy war but as a struggle to reconcile one’s faith with one’s sexuality. The film doesn’t feature experts or religious scholars, but rather individual women…
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…he American Political Science Association’s 2020 Ralph J. Bunche Award for best scholarly work exploring ethnic and cultural pluralism, and co-winner of the award for best book on race and ethnic politics. Myisha Cherry: Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, Myisha is also the Director of the Emotion and Society Lab. Her research is primarily concerned with the role of emotions and attitudes in public life….
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…ment. Women are presented as victims, unable to make choices about what is best when deciding to be sexual and when they are pregnant. In the truly progressive faith community, we hold that women have a right as moral agents to decide what is best when they face unintended pregnancy, and we believe that women are not by and large victims—they are the authors of their lives. Given the history of religious oppression, a movement that speaks or advoc…
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…ince many people to become atheists. But that’s not the point. Instead, at best, Atheos is an instructive tool for non-believers to reflect on their own positions more critically and thoughtfully. Atheos is structured as a gamified set of questions and answers inspired by the Socratic method. Users open the app and make their way through “Cave Levels,” each of which present you with hypothetical scenarios, discussions, and encounters with people o…
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…n the most obnoxious and ridiculous views must be tolerated. Bad ideas are best conquered with good ideas rather than with repression. Yet, the anti-civil liberties orientation of Christian politicians and pundits appears to be shared by several prominent atheists like Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens. For them and their followers, as for Trump and Cruz, radical Islam is best countered through jailing imams, preventing incendiary preac…
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…fear that technology might one day surpass us, the human form isn’t always best for the job. Take, for example, the synth telephone operator. Why create a physical robot for this job which has to receive audio through a wired earpiece and then respond via speaker into a microphone? Couldn’t synth software do the trick without complex parts that mimic the functions of ears and a mouth? Furthermore, wouldn’t it make better economic sense to distribu…
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…le, because the deceiver is so powerful that any contact risks corruption. Best to avoid it entirely, lest you end up like Bill Nye, the Science Guy, who changed his mind on GMOs after visiting Monsanto. Under most circumstances, the reasonable explanation would be that Nye was persuaded by argument and evidence. But for those who believe in Monsatan, the better—the only—explanation is that Nye was coerced, just as the best explanation for my skep…
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…been quite different. While Beinart’s Judaism is based on the rationalist ideals of modernity, Lerner’s Judaism is essentially a spiritual attitude of love, compassion, and generosity. So I assume he extended the same generosity of spirit to Beinart and all the accolades he received, welcoming him with open arms into the community of peace-seeking Jews that Lerner has written and spoken for—and to some extent created—for so many years. Yet Beinart…
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