Religion Dispatches
…ario, Jains run a number of large institutions with many employees, a high number of whom are not Jain. At some point, a number of people realize that the current system is a complicated and inefficient way to feed people, and so there are attempts at reforming the system. One of the questions that the would-be reformers have to consider is: What do most people, in fact, eat? That’s important, because they are trying to craft a system that takes i…
Read More…dicted that 30,000 people would participate in the service, but the actual number appeared to number around 2,000. “Our prayers will open the sky and the homosexuals will fall, we will be blessed with victory,” said Lee Young-hoon, head of the leading organization in the anti-LGBT coalition. Mexico: Supreme Court embraces marriage, Church and some political officials resist As we have been reporting, the marriage equality movement has been movemen…
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…st half didn’t mention Coe, don’t include him. Well, Coe made the list, at number four, pictured with Bush, Sr., under the headline, “The Stealth Persuader.” The secret to his stealth is simple: In a city where everybody wants to be in the news, Coe isn’t seeking publicity. Way back in 1966, when he first began assuming leadership of the organization he’d come to re-brand as the Family, he sent out a memo declaring that the time had come to “subm…
Read More…faithful in its traditional strongholds like Europe, the U.S. and Latin America, the numbers are growing at a rapid pace in one part of the world known for its cultural hostility to gay rights: sub-Saharan Africa. Since 1980, the number of Catholics in Africa has grown by 238 percent. Perhaps more important, 70 percent of them attend Sunday Mass regularly, compared with just 29 percent in the Americas. Some countries with the fastest growth — Ugan…
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…eventing abortion—but pamphlets that detail the number of gun deaths in America, the number of mass shootings, the number of accidents, the number of suicides. The movement would have more than these grassroots activists. It would have willing politicians, a legal strategy, and lots of money. All of these components would work in tandem to change people’s minds, to pressure lawmakers, to intimidate politicians running for office, to go to court wh…
Read More…immigration reform: Hispanics will drive minority growth above all. Their numbers will triple to 133 million by 2050 from 47 million today, while the number of non-Hispanic whites will remain essentially flat. Hispanics will double as a percentage of the population from 15 percent to 30 percent. The population of Asian Americans will also come close to doubling, going from 5 percent to 9 percent. The number of blacks, however, will grow only from…
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…ms. And that leads to some very bizarre moral reasoning. Utilitarianism is number-crunching, but of a very peculiar kind; in its crudest forms, it seems to imply that you can measure pleasure and pain, and that by maximizing the pleasure of the greatest number of people, you may be able to justify the infliction of pain on a select few. We see that strange logic at work in these memoranda. First, the CIA justified waterboarding with the “ticking t…
Read More…Gender Identity and Expression,” a three-day seminar hosted by the South African government and the South African Human Rights Commission. Mushwana further noted that, despite “unacceptably high levels of violence that are perpetrated solely due to another person’s sexual orientation or gender identity… we are acutely aware that discussions on these matters are either difficult or not tolerated by many leaders, be they politicians, religious leade…
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…residential candidates remain prominent and the movement has increased its numbers in the Congress and in state governments and functions as a major and sometimes the dominant faction in the Republican Party in many states. The Christian Right remains one of the most powerful movements in American history. I should add that the implications of these things are broader than may meet the eye. Donald Trump’s calls for restricting Muslims from traveli…
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…all reputable scientific and professional organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychiatric—and the list goes on (and on). But like many fundamentalist institutions, Liberty sees no issue with this bogus practice. Instead, the university finds much to celebrate in regard to Emerick’s attempts to fight against homosexuality. In fact, in Liberty’s official announcement of…
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