Religion Dispatches
…, I drew a lot on my personal stories and began to recognize how my experiences shaped my conclusions and my work. I stepped back and observed the narrative arc of my own life. I think narrative is a very helpful entry point to a more constructive and compassionate discourse, and so I wanted to model that by moving away from talking about these issues in a theoretical way and grounding them in real-world experiences. What’s been the reaction to yo…
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…ficials in Israel knew about his contacts with Hamas and Egyptian intelligence aimed at formulating the permanent truce, but nevertheless approved the assassination. “I think that they have made a strategic mistake,” Baskin said, an error “which will cost the lives of quite a number of innocent people on both sides.” Baskin is clear-eyed about Jabari, noting he was “not an angel and not a righteous man of peace,” but that “his assassination also k…
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…s identity were present. In populations where such ties were nonexistent, inciting incidents provoked extensive inter-group violence. And while atheists and the religious in the United States don’t regularly commit physical violence against one another, it is clear that invested relationships across lines of identity difference are essential for cooperation and constructive inter-group communication, whether those groups are religious or not. Whet…
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…very shortly, there will be an expression of evangelicalism which will be inclusive of LGBT people. There are a number of evangelicals that are very open to this and are having the same experience I had of actually knowing gay and lesbian people, so I think it’s inevitable. I think there will be a sector of evangelicalism that will go past mainline protestant denominations, which have more institutional restraints. The more autonomous congregation…
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…guments can be remarkably weak. He reminds us frequently that he is a “science writer,” and yet his evidence is largely anecdotal, a collection of stories. And he makes too much of the profit motive. “The transplant industry is a $20-billion-per-year business,” he reminds us. Well, so is weight loss and self-storage. Teresi does raise some troubling points about the “lowly status of the organ donor.” The District of Columbia, for example, allows d…
Read More…homosexuality, it’s still hard to argue that the language it uses doesn’t encourage violence against LGBT people. A good example is the 1995 document Persona Humana: Declaration On Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics, issued by the same Vatican office that recently condemned the US Catholic sisters’ organization, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Persona Humana suggests, for example, that “homosexuals…are definitively such becau…
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…de against Albanian Kosovars in the late 1990s. The fact is, a significant number of Serbs, and even a large number of others from traditionally Orthodox backgrounds, continue to harbor a great deal of anger about Western intervention in the Kosovo War, which they see as a failure by the West to comprehend the historical role-reversal that’s taken place, including the persecution of Orthodox Christians by Albanians and other majority-Muslim ethnic…
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…what happens. Also not a shock: for most traditions, regular church attendance increases openness to vaccination. For some traditions, such as white Catholics, this is a modest difference. For others, it’s significant: regular Black Protestant worship attenders are 16 percentage points more likely to be vaccine “accepters” than those who attend seldom or never. This suggests that pro-social in congregations works across denominational lines, and t…
Read More…e open to anyone who wishes to attend, though there will be a limit on the number of schools (no more than ten in the next decade) and the number of students enrolled. Opponents see charter schools as quasi-privatized schools (and also fear that this is a first step toward further privatization). They see even these limited charter schools as a threat to funding for public education—especially in these difficult budget years where public education…
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…g unrecognizable during the Protestant Reformation. This matters greatly since kinship systems determine what counts as incest and, thus, who is off-limits to marry. The medieval Catholic Church embraced a complex and very expansive system of prohibited family members. The Church initially restricted legitimate marriage to people beyond the 7th degree of kinship, though it was later reduced, at the 4th Lateran Council in 1215 C.E., to the 4th degr…
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