Religion Dispatches
…mon missionary in Italy, was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2011, and my latest, Marginal Mormons, just received a starred review from Kirkus.) I also marched with the Mormons for Marriage Equality contingent this year in Seattle’s Gay Pride parade, amazed to see compassionate Mormons with signs proclaiming “Sorry we’re late!” I belong to Affirmation, an organization for LGBTQ Mormons. I still have my triple combination on a bookshelf above my d…
Read More…iel Byman questions the strategic gamble Israel has embarked on: “Israel’s latest campaign in Gaza, which began on Wednesday with the killing of Hamas’ military commander, Ahmed Jabari, and air strikes on the group’s long-range rocket launchers, is a gamble — and one that Israel might lose.” Gershon Baskin, who was negotiating a cease fire with Ahmed Jabari before he was assassinated, was on Democracy Now this morning, during which he lucidly exp…
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…anything else. Third, the Catholic Church hierarchy, as evidenced by this latest editorial, continues to deny the distinction between religious rites and public rights. No one is telling the Church what to do within its magisterium (misleading rhetoric about “religious freedom” notwithstanding). I would appreciate it if it would stop telling New York what to do with ours. We’re not changing religious definitions; we’re expanding secular domains o…
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…campaign, our evangelicals—including among them many of “my” Baptists—were promoting a slew of “social issues,” but precious little “gospel.” Self-proclaimed and media-designated evangelicals had done everything they could to defeat President Obama, and in the process they discredited the evangelical message and reduced it to a mere political gospel. From where I’m sitting, it’s obvious that they need to engage in the kind of soul-searching th…
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…int. But even amid the sex and drugs, this film makes perfect sense as the latest installment of an acting career birthed in Pentecostal spirit. Ever since a woman with the “gift of prophecy” signaled a young Denzel out for future preaching prowess, he has been serious about his spiritual contribution to Hollywood film. In 2007 he explained: When I was about 20 years old, when I first started acting, I was sitting in my mother’s beauty shop. And a…
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…edia theorist Sherry Turkle, for example, registers growing concern in her latest book Alone Together (2012), but her primary worry is that a reliance upon technology blinds us to what real connection asks of us, and what it can offer. But what of the additional invisible ways that technology shapes everything we do, feel, or imagine possible? This is more than a question of being offline and online, but rather requires a reconsideration of the wa…
Read MoreOn the latest installment of my Bloggingheads program, I spoke with RD contributor Sarah Sentilles about her piece on Richard Mourdock’s comments on rape and abortion. We discussed what would happen if politicians were compelled to offer non-religious justifications for their policy positions; how prevalent the view that God controls everything is; and why invoking religion lets politicians off the hook. We also talked about how God’s will is inv…
Read MoreIn his latest Project Syndicate column, ethicist Peter Singer takes a novel approach to religiously-based requests for exemptions from following laws that serve to relieve suffering. Singer compares the objections of Jewish and Muslim groups in the Netherlands to a law that would require all animals to be stunned before slaughter. These groups claim the law would limit their religious freedom by altering mandated slaughter rituals which require t…
Read More…lescence that it wouldn’t have been as horrible as it was, but perhaps the latest rash of gay teen suicides puts the lie to that belief. We have tons of out celebrities, writers, and performers, and still teens are getting the message that their lives are somehow less than others, that their lives are evil and not worth living. I blame the religious right and their insistence on their “religious freedom” to condemn and bully LGBT people for this c…
Read More…s a part of an ongoing intra-conservative battle over Islamophobia. In his latest post at National Review, Schmitz writes, logically dismantling Yerushalmi’s panic: It remains the case that anti-sharia activists have identified a grand total of seven cases in 35 years in which American courts have allegedly enforced sharia or other foreign-law based judgments. In none of them were the serious injustices that advocates of anti-sharia laws typically…
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