Religion Dispatches
…eads many white audience members to make quick assumptions using the quickest, stereotypic misunderstandings about the minority group in question. We saw the same during the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson and the media’s use of his image to portray a large, black male (read as ‘thuggish’), rather than an 18-year-old high school graduate about to start his college career. With hashtags (#IfTheyGunnedMeDown), Black Twitter immediately drew atten…
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…ector of religion or ideology. . . . Those of use who believe in justice must stand against [radical hatred] by working to pass sane gun laws, better [understand] how all of our religions can be turned toward hatred if we are not ever-vigilant. . . Yes. And just as we must better understand how any religion can be turned toward and made to express hatred, so too we can and must give ourselves to turning our faith traditions against such hatred so…
Read More…ing don’t go far enough. . . . These unenforceable “commitments” are, at best, a step in the right direction and, at worse, a way for government leaders to try to fool their citizens and, perhaps, themselves into thinking they are doing the right thing. If this sounds familiar, it should: big companies have been promising to cut their carbon output for a decade or more, setting targets and timelines of their own choosing. It hasn’t worked. Emissio…
Read More…irl and her family, publishing their personal details online so that activists could phone and text-message “Agata” to dissuade her from her choice. They followed Agata to a second clinic when the family attempted the procedure there; charging in the media that the girl was being pressured into the abortion by Planned Parenthood and informing the police that Agata’s mother was “inciting her daughter to abortion,” leading to the illegal separation…
Read More…Rev. Al Sharpton. Also speaking was Rev. Christine Wiley of Covenant Baptist United Church of Christ in Washington DC; Wiley was a co-chair of DC Clergy United for Marriage Equality, which played a visible role during the successful legislative campaign for marriage equality in DC. Speakers at Friday’s press conference focused on the distinction between civil and religious marriage. Said Rev. Deman Coates, senior pastor of an 8,000-member church…
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…hose services are preventive, including wellness exams, cancer screenings, STD testing and treatment, and birth control. (italics added) Support from the Old Guard Over the past few years Rose has not only received considerable publicity from anti-choice media outlets, she now has been surrounded by a veteran group of conservative supporters. Last September she was a featured speaker at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit, where she…
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…at have contributed to oppression.” A similar situation happened at Yale just last month when, after pressure from students, the university renamed its Calhoun College due to John C. Calhoun’s support of slavery as a “positive good.” Also last fall at the Jesuit Georgetown, the president made an unprecedented move to atone for the role Georgetown once played in the slave trade by offering preferential status in admissions to descendants of slaves….
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…-Catholic University star Charles Curran; Albert Jonsen, a Jesuit bioethicist; and Father Drinan, Dean of Boston College Law School, rounded out the team. According to Giles, the moral theologians and priests met together for a while before being joined by the Kennedys and Shrivers, who asked questions. Ted Kennedy had the good fortune to engage in discourse about abortion and Catholicism before the papacy of John Paul II virtually closed the wind…
Read More…ar, the calls are few and far between. The New York Times builds its whole story out of a handful of phone calls and an email. But the article indicates that those who run the various nonprofits that help soldiers achieve conscientious objector status expect a floodgate of calls if Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is formally repealed. The good news is that the groups don’t think there is legal basis for the claims. In the “don’t ask, don’t tell” cases, Ms. M…
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…ay I can survive this desert. *** NOVEMBER 2017 What’s happened since we last spoke? I stopped attending services in March. I know you wrote about how I walked out of a service. Well, that kept happening. Eventually you realize you’re spending more of Sunday walking out than you are sitting in your seat and it’s time to consider taking a break from church. Where are you now? Have you left your church completely? I moved to Michigan. Part of moving…
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