Religion Dispatches
…news reader, to account for the violence he and his brother carried out in Boston. After all, are not religious male Muslims supposed to carry out the military jihad against non-Muslims as an essential requirement of their faith? Such popular perceptions of jihad are often predicated on the assumptions that a) jihad is relentless, bloody warfare to be waged by Muslims (en masse) against non-Muslims (en masse) until Islam occupies the whole world o…
Read More…dent Drew G. Faust beseeching him to halt the event and the Archdiocese of Boston released a statement condemning it. The controversy demonstrates the cycle of appropriation that often occurs between religious authorities longing for a direct encounter with extraordinary evil and dissenters who perform the script of evil. In an e-mail, Greaves described the black mass as a “non-story,” insisting that it’s meant as a performance of his religious cu…
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…th the young voters who did show up, but the youth vote continues to be outnumbered by older voter turnout across the country. Even that might be somewhat generous. As USA Today notes, Sanders won a smaller share of the under-thirty demographic than he did in 2016 in several states. It’s worth noting this shift in a religion-and-politics column because young voters also tend to be less religious voters. By any measure, the younger an American adul…
Read More…back in July of last year by U.S. District Court Judge Joseph L. Tauro, in Boston. He ruled that Section 3 violates the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment and “violated the Tenth Amendment and fell outside Congress’ authority under the Spending Clause of the Constitution.” The Department of Justice appealed the decision in October, but now apparently will abandon that appeal. It’s good news for supporters of marriage equality, even if the f…
Read More…ast depopulation because women have stopped having enough children. As the number of women in the workforce has soared, many have delayed marriage and childbearing, or decided against them altogether. The Sexual Revolution, by making sex readily available without marriage, removed what for many men had been a powerful motive to marry. Skyrocketing rates of divorce have made women less likely to have as many children as in generations past. Years o…
Read More…locale. Worse, English settlement of Jamestown predates Plymouth Rock and Boston. Recent archaeological studies aren’t helping matters any. As it turns out, what many historians have long assumed to be true, based on evidence from documents, has confirmation in bio-archaeological findings—namely, that starving Jamestown residents gnawed on human flesh: Archaeologists excavating a trash pit at the Jamestown colony site in Virginia have found the f…
Read More…time, Mr. Cohen. One commenter on the Advocate.com’s Web site, Edward from Boston, makes a good point – Cohen had the opportunity, not just to disavow this legislation, but to do more to stop it: … the obvious question was: would he file a complaint with the Ugandan government for misusing his work to justify the potential killing of gays? Would he make a public statement decrying the proposed law? Would he stand with Gay Activists in protesting b…
Read More…Muslim, who emigrated from Senegal. I remember returning to New York from Boston after 9/11. The fact that I was a New Yorker trumped any other identification I had — both race and religion. It was understood that I shared in the grief of the city and was committed to rebuilding. I also remember the city being one of the least fear-filled places in the country after the attack on the Twin Towers. The goal of terrorists is not to kill, but to caus…
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…greedy individuals or a tragedy of the commons? And who’s to blame for the Boston bombing? For rising inequality? For the killing of Jon Snow? As the editors of The Cubit, RD’s science-and-religion portal, blame has been on our minds, for ours is a Golden Age of Finger Pointing. Over the next two weeks, The Cubit will feature a series of articles that explore how fault gets distributed in contemporary society. How does blame take form in the publi…
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…by “introducing powerful men to Jesus, the Family has managed to effect a number of behind-the-scenes acts of diplomacy.” For example, when the National Prayer Breakfast is held in person, this event allows individuals access to the president without going through the usual vetting process by the State Department. As anticipated, secular groups continue to express concern over the religious rhetoric used during this year’s NPB with repeated calls…
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