Religion Dispatches
…ch. We are the Church.” While a single example, this statement reminds us, today, on World AIDS Day 2008, that throughout its history, AIDS/HIV has been entangled with religion—for good and ill. As we move into the second quarter century of the pandemic, this entanglement continues. Twenty-first century religion has been shaped by and has shaped the AIDS/HIV crisis; they continue to shape one another. Today, we often hear about this entanglement i…
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…he order is hard to predict, especially in the wake of the House’s passage today of “Trumpcare,” also known as the American Health Care Act, which effectively guts the ACA, including its “preventive care mandate.” According to numerous reports, the version passed by the House today not only repeals protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions, but actually adds to the list of pre-existing conditions that someone can be denied health insu…
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…any form of religious progressivism. Yet the original social gospel, like today’s progressives, also faced the challenge of defining its mission to the larger culture, specifically, how best to engage important political and economic interests of the time. This engagement led the movement to raise a number of questions about its mission. For example, was the social gospel’s primary objective to cast a wide ideological net to create a broad coalit…
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…s among mainline clergy extend to broader protections for LGBTQ Americans. Today, women clergy overwhelmingly (96%) favor laws that would protect gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people against discrimination in jobs, public accommodations, and housing, compared with 88% of men clergy. Women clergy (86%) today are also more likely than men (64%) to oppose allowing a small business owner to refuse, on the basis of their beliefs, to provide p…
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…ow, for example, that exposure to ultraviolet radiation triggers mutations today, then we can also assume it would have had a similar influence on creatures living hundreds of millions of years ago. Meyer observes that, today, when we see something intricate and functional—such as a computer or a can opener—we assume that it’s been designed by some intelligence. Consequently, extrapolating from present observations into the past, the design of an…
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…ealed: What could top such a list? Since we’re on the subject of disasters today, we might have noted how, amid the response to Hurricane Katrina, George W. Bush’s FEMA hyped Robertson’s philanthropic arm, Operation Blessing. This organization is small and unorthodox at best, and has been accused of various irregularities. Yet early in the crisis it appeared on a FEMA list of just three places to donate, alongside the Red Cross. If we compare thes…
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…funds for poverty alleviation or affordable housing, or, as they are doing today, for an extension of unemployment insurance or a raise in the minimum wage, but they dare not question the underlying structures that create poverty or homelessness or long-term unemployment. The more they were targeted by the Right for even these liberal aspirations, the more timid and uninspiring they became. In the liberal pews there is rarely a naming of the “prin…
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…a devoted pamphleteer, never had an unpublished thought. If he were alive today, there’d be a “Grace-Upon-Grace.com” web site emitting plenty of tweets, pokes and emails. Follow his example. 9. Lose the old polarities. Again, ’tis sacrilege to suggest that liberal-conservative poles no longer define theological argument. However, the waning influence of the religious right, demonstrated by the election of a U.S. president who’s trying to reach be…
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…financial doom while their futures were sold from the rich to the richer. Today, as we think about how commitments must be contemplated in the context of right and wrong, of earth and heaven, we know that those notes have no moral weight, that banks can’t and shouldn’t own the futures of people who work, and that it’s time for the bankers to abandon their claims on everyday people’s futures. I will leave it to another [on this day] to think about…
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…bsolute devotion to the sex, violence, and drugs of the film. Christianity Today’s review makes one wonder why they even reviewed it in the first place, as it seems to indicate the film has nothing to do either with “Christianity,” or “today” for that matter. More specifically, it’s curious how few religiously-oriented reviewing outlets were able to see possible symbolic references to, say, Abraham and Isaac, Jesus, or others. So, I’m left wonderi…
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