Religion Dispatches
…s, with a seat on the House Intelligence Committee, Mrs. Bachmann you know better. Shame on you, Michele! You should stand on the floor of the House and apologize to Huma Abedin and to Secretary Clinton and to the millions of hardworking, loyal, Muslim Americans for your wild and unsubstantiated charges. As a devoted Christian, you need to ask forgiveness for this grievous lack of judgment and reckless behavior. (emphasis mine) House Speaker John…
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…ldare to ER. In Chinese culture, acupuncture is similarly reinforced and encoded as effective therapy. Antibiotics, and apparently also acupuncture, work regardless of your belief system—but they work better if you believe in them. Double-Blind The history of medicine up until the last century was essentially the history of the placebo effect. Double-blind, randomized control trials are now the gold standard in medical research and have only been…
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…not. Does this make me completely lame? Perhaps. It is certainly true, at least from a certain perspective, that it is easier to stay home on Sunday mornings (or Friday or Saturday evenings, as the case may be) than to go listen to the bland proclamation of what passes for sacred truth in many American congregations, or to allow oneself to get involved in the complex life of a community. But just because people are not showing their courage in a r…
Read More…hael Lavers covered the conference. Randy Berry, the special U.S. envoy to promote global LGBT rights, spoke at the gathering that took place at a Tegucigalpa hotel alongside gay Peruvian Congressman Carlos Bruce, transgender Venezuelan National Assembly candidate Tamara Adrián, Costa Rican Deputy Minister of the Interior Carmen Muñoz, Honduran Vice Minister of Human Rights and Justice Karla Cueva, Gonzalo Cid Vega of the Chilean Ministry of Labor…
Read More…It seems that’s when the personhood battle really became a power struggle between the personhood lobby and the Republican leadership. With so many amendments and so much public controversy surrounding the bill, the Republican leadership opted not to bring the bill forward. This raised the ire of Personhood USA and Oklahomans for Life, who continued to lobby for its passage. Personhood USA responded immediately with a press release calling Speaker…
Read More…ed view of the shari’ah “threat,” saying that he opposed a shari’ah “legal code” but stopped short of a full-on endorsement of shari’ah law bans. (That said, Reed does indeed understand his audience, and its fears.) The composition of the Faith and Freedom panel led me to believe he might have been attempting if not a rapprochement, then at least some balance. Ironically enough, the panel followed one on alleged anti-evangelical bigotry, though fe…
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…to win souls first, votes second. Though there was a lot of common ground between these two groups—they were committed anticommunists and anti-New Dealers—the organizational ties between them were quite thin. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Christian right was distinct from the conservative movement. That’s not to say, however, that figures in the political right were not overtly religious. The history of Catholic anticommunism has been well document…
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…ess creativity of the universe and the objective validity of human rights. Promoting and accepting religious images as universal will help heal culture war divisions and promote the formation of a broad-based progressive coalition. Frederick Clarkson: Thanks for hosting this discussion, Linell. I think these matters are integral to the functioning, the advance, and indeed the survival of Constitutional democracy. But I think that in order to give…
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…imed part of the prison as its own. But most importantly, the relationship between the gang and the church mirrored the relationship between churches and people in favelas. There was mutual respect, which was essential to preserving the peace. Gang members could leave the gang and join the church as long as their participation was deemed genuine. It would be very difficult to fake a conversion in prison because someone’s observing your actions 24…
Read More…individuals, while conference co-organizer Julia Hunter will film “It Gets Better” videos by and for Mormons. “That this conference is even happening is hard evidence that things are getting better,” says Hunter. “I hope that the energy generated here this weekend will continue to ripple outward into our community with love and understanding; that the conversation will continue—on the web, in our chapels, with our visiting teachers, between brothe…
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