Religion Dispatches
…, seven thousand black South Africans were killed under apartheid, and the number imprisoned was far higher. The Catholic Church neither kills nor imprisons ordained women and their supporters; excommunication, while painful, is not at all the same, even when financial losses accompany it. In 2007 I published an article in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion explaining in some detail why highly educated white women simply cannot say that t…
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…se who has promised to appoint someone to the Supreme Court, “as close to Scalia as I could find.” This, presumably, would unleash some new conservative Golden Age and make genuflection before the Trump idol worthwhile. Catholics, on the other hand, even the more conservative-leaning culture warriors, appear unwilling to give Trump a pass, even in the name of all that is holy to them: opposition to abortion and the restoration of Christian homogen…
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…ongregations cannot, that some of the fastest-growing varieties of evangelicalism in America are in the charismatic and Pentecostal vein, and these are explicitly multiracial movements. A number of the more farsighted leaders are therefore making a conscious effort to include and empower nonwhite individuals and groups. At the very least, they are doing what they can to collect their votes. Jim Domen is one such leader. A California pastor and the…
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…g deprived of an authentic liberal arts education (and in some cases bullied), is to let them know that we are paying attention, and that we are not indifferent. These stories of dissent and disagreement complicate any kind of “sea change” narrative about American evangelicalism moving toward moderation and openness. But whatever the future of American evangelicalism, I can’t help but wonder how many of my generational peers who chose evangelical…
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…who seldom or never attend church (17% in 2023 to 24% in 2023), but these numbers are far below the proportion of the general population who have opted out of religious services (54%). And while there has been some fluctuation among the “super attenders,” those who attend church once a week or more, a majority of White evangelical Protestants still report attending church this frequently—a rate more than double the general population (54% vs. 24%…
Read More…Ya think??? Trouble is, this stuff really isn’t funny. In point of fact, a number of official Catholic statements on sexuality—it’s invariably sexuality and gender they’re riled up about—are downright dangerous. Take, for example, the Ugandan Catholic bishops. As Peter Montgomery reported in RD this week, they joined recently with Anglican and Orthodox bishops “to speed-up the process of enacting the Anti-Homosexuality Law.” This is the bill which…
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…is “two basic components,” a body and a soul. The other response is “physicalism,” the belief that “all we have, or are, are bodies.” Kagan is a physicalist: “The body works and it breaks. That’s all there is to death.” But that doesn’t mean that it’s no big deal. According to the “deprivation account,” death is a bad thing—“it deprives you of the goods of life that you might otherwise be getting.” Conversely, when life only offers bad things—if,…
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…by the Al Qassam Brigades). Yousef Munayyer provides some history of the numbers from Gaza at Open Zion: For example, in 2011, the projectiles fired by the Israeli military into Gaza have been responsible for the death of 108 Palestinians, of which 15 where women or children, and the injury of 468 Palestinians, of which 143 where women or children. The methods by which these causalities were inflicted by Israeli projectiles breaks down as follow…
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…sota who said children only become people at age 5. Another said “a common number that is going around is 4 years old.” Arguments that college students make to provoke activists and demonstrators should probably not be taken at face value, but more importantly neither these people nor McArdle’s article offered any data indicating an increase in support for infanticide. In fact, Gallup polls show Americans are pretty evenly divided on abortion. A r…
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…nt and CEO of the Center for Inquiry, an organization I have worked with a number of times (I recently accepted an invitation to join their Speakers’ Bureau) and whose “Living Without Religion” campaign I greatly admire. In his blog, Lindsay wrote that “it’s nice that some politicians are finally willing to acknowledge our existence, but are we so desperate for acceptance that we’ll allow others to condescendingly misdescribe us as adherents of a…
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