Religion Dispatches
…micro-managed by men with photographic memories who could describe, on the phone at long distance, where a file was located, and what page in that file needed scanning. There was obsessive record-keeping, coupled with a mastery of spin. (Squillari suggests that Madoff planted several pieces of evidence in his office in order to be arrested on his own timetable and on his own terms). The most haunting line in the article is a description of the sta…
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…ces like Tehran, or Athens, or Beijing, that are armed and enabled by cell phone technology and the almost instantaneous circulation of striking images of authoritarian crackdown, impossible to contain or control. There is an old philosophical quandary posed as follows: can a fish imagine water? Similarly, Religion Dispatches exists within the very medium that it is simultaneously attempting to theorize. It is as global as the instruments it use…
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…ned by the military; the president allowing for the funding of stem-cell research; the denigration of Christianity and the “preferentialism” toward Islam; the Air Force Academy (in my home city of Colorado Springs) forced to pay to “add a Stonehenge-like worship center for pagans, druids, witches, and Wiccans”; the celebration of Iftar and conscious shunning of National Prayer Day at the White House; and on and on. If you think this issue hasn’t c…
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…ower,” says Political Research Associates’ senior religion and sexuality researcher, Rev. Dr. Kapya Kaoma, who has researched U.S. conservatives’ influence on African LGBTQ laws since 2008. “By signing the law, Museveni is strengthening his political base in Uganda among evangelical churches, while blaming the international community’s condemnation of the law for cuts to incoming foreign aid. Through this act, Museveni has declared war, and sancti…
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…force us to leave,” Robertson concluded. “I felt the full weight of their fear, and where there is such fear, we can be certain that there is no possibility of love. Phone calls and an email inquiry to representatives of the Southern Baptist Convention were not returned….
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…lishing the following Q&A. But these missteps don’t involve Miller’s own research, and, despite the dubious sourcing, a number of Miller’s claims are persuasive. There is evidence—much of it from Miller’s own, peer-reviewed work—that self-reported spiritual experience lowers the risk for substance abuse, depression, and unprotected sex among adolescents. There’s also plenty of evidence that adolescents can use spiritual experiences and techniques…
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…e convenience store with Skittles and a soft-drink and talking on his cell phone with his friend. Instead, all that Zimmerman could see was a hooded threat. And so, he deputized himself to be the police, and in that capacity shot Trayvon Martin dead. But more than just deputizing himself to act with police power (and this is the crucial point of Dr. Butler’s reflections), he deputized himself to stand in the place of god, to act in god’s name and…
Read More…eard this evening was rolled out here, in the first five minutes, as point number two. And Senator McCain repeated it all evening long, lest we miss it. He now proposes a state-sponsored re-definition of the current housing market, such that the federal government will buy up an enormous number of imminent foreclosures (how?), mandate a new evaluation of the real value of these homes (how?), then enable homeowners to re-negotiate their current mor…
Read More…City tag.” He notes that anti-gay religious activists, while not large in number, are relatively vocal: Choi Chi-sum, general secretary of the conservative Christian group, the Society For Truth And Light, for example, has been given an increasingly prominent stage to present his views following Taiwan’s legislative change. His opinions on same-sex marriage, sexual minority anti-discrimination laws, and even the recent “controversy” over a homose…
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…Sullins, described in the conference program as the Institute’s “Senior Research Associate” and “leader in the field of research on same-sex parenting and its implications for child development.” Sullins’ main talk enlisted countless slides with numbers, tables, and colored graphs in an effort to question the well established fact that, in addition to scant data supporting even a modest success rate, treatments aiming to suppress sexual orientati…
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