Religion Dispatches
…art company. It is important to recall that Catholic anti-Modernism is not new; it too has a history. In fact, Catholic anti-Modernism is celebrating an ironic centennial. As Claus Arnold documents in his recent analysis of newly-released documents in the Vatican Secret Archives, the Church came only slowly to its current theological anti-Modernism (his essay, “Antimodernismo e magistero Romano: la redazione della Pascendi,” Rivista di storia del…
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…hatred and violence on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity. New Ways Ministry’s Bob Shine responded to the report, saying “The realities of suffering and abuse necessitate renewed solidarity from Catholics, including human rights advocacy by the Vatican.” Shine noted a recent statement from the international Network of Reform Movements, which said that “the dignity of the human person is clearly expressed in the Gospels and the soci…
Read More…affney reiterated his shari’ah claims: As the Center for Security Policy’s new, best-selling Team B II report entitled, Shariah: The Threat to America, found, It is now public knowledge that nearly every major Muslim organization in the United States is actually controlled by the MB or a derivative organization. Consequently, most of the Muslim-American groups of any prominence in America are now known to be, as a matter of fact, hostile to the Un…
Read More…known for attacks on Scientology, decided to send a message to the Catholic Church by shutting down the official Vatican website (still not responding as of this posting). What are the Church’s misdeeds, according to these code crusaders? They go back to the selling of indulgences in the 16th century. And more recently, of course, there’s the Church’s interference in Italy’s domestic politics. (Not just Italy, we’d have to say.) – The Eds. …
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…elivered—dissent and approval, femininity and righteousness and pleasure—encoded the proceedings with a special kind of attention, another layer to Supreme Court ritual. Those fabric beacons shone powerfully for those of us who have experienced marginalization, had to code switch from setting to setting, or learned to express ourselves through subtle cues beyond formal language. While it’s not a huge surprise that some of Ginsburg’s collars will r…
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…ocess of drafting a new Constitution that will supposedly pave the way for new elections. The African Centre for Law and Justice is aiming to do in Zimbabwe precisely what the religious right seeks to accomplish in the United States: declare the country a “Christian nation” guided by biblical principles, outlaw abortion, and ostracize and criminalize LGBT people. In the ACLJ, Bourland and Mpofu have powerful allies. Sekulow, who has been named one…
Read More…r of continued discrimination and oppression. Right-wing opponents likely knew that pushback on the categorization of LGBTQ sex as “unnatural” would fail, and anticipated that their silence would be interpreted as a gesture toward equity. They remain unmoored, however, from social ideals like religious, gender, and sexual equality, and economic justice. The kind of neoliberal capitalism Modi represents relies on the very differences it sows—it ree…
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…e, especially if they come from a background with a strict religious/moral code and a bend toward evangelicalism, is not only reasonable but necessary and in no way suggests that a specific faith practice should be disqualifying. As Geoffrey Stone and Eric Segall noted in the New York Times: …asking a nominee about her strong faith, and whether she can put her religious views aside when deciding cases that implicate those views, is nowhere close t…
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…to make sure this predator was not around children. No one challenged the code of deference to those higher up and obedience to the rule of secrecy. Now we have “the largest institutional crisis in centuries, possibly in Church history,” declares the National Catholic Reporter in an editorial. The New York Times, which broke the story of abuse at the deaf school in Wisconsin, quotes a priest in Berlin as saying the crisis is “the worst in 100 yea…
Read More…ntrists” was about a “broader agenda” than the culture wars. They wanted a new president to address poverty, health care reform, and global warming. But it was clear, nonetheless, that these leaders and the constituency they supposedly represented still demanded that Democrats stop being so strident on abortion. By August, then, Democrats agreed to let Rick Warren be the arbiter of the candidates’ faith cred; Obama cringed at abortion questions an…
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