Religion Dispatches
…rate Islam from who most Muslims are: Colonized persons, or their recent descendants. Hence their Islam, and much of Islam today, is the product of a cycle of violence and subjugation. Most Muslims are used to and even expect to be discriminated against; they are not used to being heard. Rather than consider Islam more violent than other religions, let us consider whether we are upset with the violence, or instead in whose name and for what reason…
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…loited labor extracted to support the seemingly natural, godly gifts of Driscoll is discussed at any length or with any depth in the podcast. Instead, charisma is assumed as a known quantity and supernatural quality bestowed by God and possessed by select, unique individuals—a blessing and a curse, according to the podcast’s narrative. White male leaders in Driscoll’s orbit during the church’s rise and fall—those who enabled and capitalized on his…
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…te boundary. Before secular government enthusiasts get too excited by this number I would point out that, for a fair number of evangelicals, the worry is that the state will interfere with the church, not the other way around. Similarly, a little more than one in four White evangelicals said the federal government should declare Christianity the official religion of the United States. Far more (61%) said that Christianity should not be the officia…
Read More…en though opposition to same-sex marriage seems to be cooling its heels at number three, it’s presence is still felt in just about all aspects of the “value voters” belief system. With abortion remaining at the number one spot, it’s clear that all things sexual continue to occupy the minds of those who seem the most opposed to anyone actually having sex. It’s interesting to view the “value voter” summit in juxtaposition with a new survey conducted…
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…her churches to seek the varieties of Christian faith expressions. In high school, I lived with Jewish, Catholic, Unitarian Universalists. By the time of my first years in college, I was studying traditions from the Far East. Eventually I lived as a Buddhist in an ashram and practiced meditation each morning and evening. I was already a vegetarian, part of my transforming consciousness about toxins and waste for the body and the spirit. Entering I…
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…y) and had no “beef” with Judaism at all. “Justification by faith” in this scenario does not constitute a critique of Torah observance in general. Rather it is a critique of Gentile observance of Torah in particular. In no way does Paul condemn Judaism, and he certainly does not construct Judaism and Christianity as antithetical religions. His letters were written to a Gentile audience, and if there is any condemnation of religious practice to be…
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…ize real human beings, but subjective poll topics make for very convenient scapegoats. When Martin Luther King Jr. led the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the buzzword was “rights.” In that time, however, society was very different. Despite the Jim Crow laws and discrimination against African Americans in the South, the country was not as polarized as it is now. President Lyndon Johnson had embarked upon his “Great Society,” seeking to unite A…
Read More…partners is positive would be just over 55%. Kristin Dunkle, a behavioral scientist at The Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, collaborated with colleagues from Emory and San Francisco to explore this very question in Zambia. Their findings were published in July 2008 in Lancet. Dunkle and her colleagues analyzed data from demographic and health surveys conducted on 2,279 residents of Lusaka, Zambia and found that the vast majori…
Read More…—income factors that may have made low-cost clinics more appealing, or the number of abortion clinics in the U.S. and how that has changed over the time period in question, or the possibility that people in private practice would rather not perform abortions for any number of possible reasons, including threats on their lives—you’d be left unsatisfied. Likewise, the report expresses grave concern over the fact that the very same clinics that see…
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…st, whereas Vermont—known to be a liberal state—clocked in with the lowest number of both Internet porn searches and religiosity. Just knowing the number of conservatives in a given state was enough information for the researchers to accurately predict the extent of pornography searches using key words including sex, gay sex, porn, free porn, XXX, and gay porn. These findings held true even after the researchers controlled for other demographic va…
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