Religion Dispatches
…Dante. Finding a lost island, especially this one, somewhere in the South Pacific, is not far from that—particularly when the island seems to contain the very light of heaven and hell, making it more of a purgatory. Taking and Shaking Having said all that, here are some connections between Lost and religion that are worth checking out, even if only for the sake of teaching a “religion and popular culture” course. Lost lushly abounds in religious…
Read More…sy for female employees affected by the numerous lawsuits against the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage requirement to find a better job. *Correction: This post originally indicated that gender separation was due to concerns about women’s menstrual cycles. To read more about gender separation among Haredi Jews in Israel and in the U.S. read the Forward’s excellent piece from 2011….
Read More…in an airplane aisle knows there will be some sort of contact as you move past; the space just isn’t big enough for most people to avoid that. If your goal is sincerely to avoid contact, it seems to me that remaining in your own seat, lowering your eyes and simply relinquishing your claim to the armrest would be a more effective means of not touching a woman. It seems hard to believe that “hundreds” of men wound up in the same situation and found…
Read More…vioral Risk Factor Surveillance System does include a question that allows participants to identify as transgender or gender-nonconforming, but states are not required to include that question in their surveys. In the first quarter of 2015, over 24% of LGBQ Hoosiers reported that they had 14 or more “unhealthy days” each month. By the end of the year, that number had jumped to nearly 60%. Heterosexual people in Indiana did not report any significa…
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…uding a girl from my high school whose mother supplied enough acid to Dead parking lots to pay her kids’ private school tuition. In other words, being a Dead fan, for someone like me, would have been the easiest thing in the world. There was just one problem: I hated the Dead. I hated their noodly, shuffling music; hated, in my nascent angry young feminist way, the glazed-eyed girls who swayed through those parking lots asking for change, and the…
Read More…list who insisted that bishops and archbishops who have ordained women not participate in the laying on of hands at his consecration. Archbishop John Sentamu, who had participated in the ordination of Libby Lane as the Church of England’s first female bishop last month, was among those who exhibited this “gracious restraint.” Writes Reader: This is, so we are to understand from Sentamu, not to imply a theology of “taint” around women priests, alth…
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…igion doesn’t have to prove itself true,” she says, and her frustration is palpable. And, she adds, believers have never encouraged atheists to be more vocal or to express themselves more wholly. (See the aforementioned astronomer with his idea that there might be more than one sun. And that dude was no doubt a Christian.) “Anger can misfire badly. When we express anger, we get angrier,” she says. “But anger is the chief reason we know something…
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…was caught after the murder, fleeing halfway across the state, he had the phone number of an Operation Rescue leader on his dashboard—the tip of the iceberg in terms of the broader connections he’d built with anti-abortion extremists. The church, Roeder would later testify, emerged as the only place he could find a shot at Tiller, around the elaborate security measures the doctor had learned to follow at his clinic and home. “Justifiable homicide…
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…itan organization. Worn-Out Soles Both Brother David and Millsap have been participating in these patrols for about five years. We drive down to the Senoita checkpoint along the border, near the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, where a new stretch of fence running along the border is visible. But we do not see anyone. The recent immigration crackdowns are only one piece of the larger picture that Brother David calls “the push-pull factor.” Lac…
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…n to God and to the world of the Bible. Later, in the seventeenth century, particularly in Scotland, the organization began to expand beyond its medieval foundation. Men who were not actually stonemasons, including other artisans, affluent gentlemen, and those with philosophical and scientific interests, started to join the lodges, drawn by their social conviviality and their traditions of ritual and secrecy. This custom of including non-stonemaso…
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