Religion Dispatches
…like our readers to know about your book? If you buy the book, cut out the correct pages using the Fibonacci sequence, and lay them out on the floor in the shape of a pentagram, it will reveal a secret code allowing you to join the ranks of Illuminati and obtain untold riches and power. This is a very complicated procedure and you may have to buy several copies to get it right….
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…endorsed the message of the Believe Out Loud video. Sojourners thought it better to promote the video that way—”in an editorial context.” King’s original post has a pretty active comments section—much of it critical of Sojourners, some supportive. Although criticism—on or off its own pages—doesn’t appear to be pushing the group toward any capitulation, or, as McLaren makes plain, towards any activism on LGBT rights. Mark Silk notes that while Soj…
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…aren’t so much sober accusations of individuals’ crimes than an insiders’ code for ‘elite liberals.’ The Satanic abuse panic of the 1980s and 90s led to the persecution and false convictions of many innocent people and caused traumatic rifts in communities. The panic involved gothic stories of bloody ceremonies conducted by community-members in black robes, including graphic claims of child and adult sexual abuse and rumors of specific “cult” loc…
Read More…ffers high family entertainment value, therefore we will be continuing our promotion. “We regularly offer promotions to our IKEA FAMILY members across a variety of entertainment options, and in this case, our IKEA FAMILY members were being offered a discount on tickets to the show. “As a company, IKEA Singapore respects the diversity and equality of all people living in our community. We also respect that all individuals have a right to their opin…
Read More…tark misogyny of the antiabortion movement with the tagline “Women Deserve Better” (than abortion). Feminists for Life has been an early promoter of the increasingly popular prolife emphasis on the harm abortion does to women, and a champion of “father’s rights” with the help of the disgraced ex-Bush appointee Wade Horn (the former pro-abstinence Assistant Secretary of Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services who r…
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…key function of their official capacity, and legally recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex. While several county clerks offices have already implemented procedures to allow clerks to hand off marriage license duties to another clerk if they have a religious conviction, SB 522 goes much further, the Tribune notes. The bill goes into great detail about the chain of recusal, laying out the protocol if a county clerk, their deputy c…
Read More…omosexuality is largely taboo.” Nestled in the Caucasus, at the crossroads between East and West, Georgia has witnessed a cultural clash between liberal forces and religious conservatives over the past decade, as it embarked on radical reforms and rapid modernization. Its leaders have worked hard to westernize the country’s image but homophobia remains widespread, rights groups say. Bokvadze was an organizer of “a now-infamous rally in 2013 agains…
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…s (e.g., Talal Asad, José Casanova, Charles Taylor, Saba Mahmood, and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd) have argued, the delimitation of the social spheres of religion and politics, and the boundary between them, is socially-constituted, variable, and constantly contested. This does not mean that “there is no such thing” as religion or politics, or that one term can simply be collapsed into the other; it means that what counts as religion and politics will…
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…ed values. After all, “religious” or “friendly to religion” is essentially code for deference to the conservative Christian values of exclusion and exceptionalism. If Democrats wish to embody their espoused values of inclusion and freedom for all Americans, they ought to ignore the Republican framing of the question entirely and instead find a better story to tell. Christianity remains hegemonic in American discourse, and that’s a key reason Democ…
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…they had players like Daniel Berrigan. They were the word-made-flesh team. Between 1995 and 1998 I had three children. By the time the youngest was a year old, I was schlepping all three to Sunday mass. On September 11, 2001, the day the towers fell, I went to pray in my church while two miles away my priests were blessing buckets of body parts. On a blisteringly sunny April morning in 2004, after being up all night, I knocked on my pastor’s door…
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