Religion Dispatches
…ise Keepers experienced an extraordinary growth spurt, drawing tens of thousands of men to rallies in football stadiums and sports arenas across the country. As attendance at its rallies grew—278,000 in 1994, 738,000 in 1995 and more than a million in 1996—so did its revenues. In 1997, more than one million men gathered on the National Mall in Washington for “Stand in the Gap.” Not long after “Stand in the Gap,” however, the organization hit hard…
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…n Bailout! Advocacy Campaign Marjorie Dannenfelser, the President of the Susan B. Anthony List, recently announced plans for the Stop the Abortion Bailout! advocacy campaign, which according to the group’s press release, aims to convince the Senate to preserve “federal abortion funding restrictions.” The campaign intends “to secure the 41 votes necessary to sustain a filibuster against measures promoting federal taxpayer funding of abortion.” The…
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…professor and chairman of the history department at Texas State University-San Marcos; and Lybeth Hodges, professor of history and government at Texas Woman’s University, all provide the panel with solid mainstream advanced academic credentials and educational experience. In their expert reviews, Kracht, de la Teja, and Hodges offer reasonable suggestions for curriculum updates; while the other three offer suggestions that reveal a bizarre politic…
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…se of leprosy as an analogy for HIV/AIDS, beginning at least as early as Susan Sontag’s influential work, AIDS and Its Metaphors; and on the other, increasingly literal links between the two diseases, including evidence of leprosy itself as an opportunistic infection associated with AIDS and a connection between “AIDS drugs” and leprosy. On the one hand, decades of caring for people with AIDS and HIV. On the other hand, ringing words not of canoni…
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…be anything but. F the Fare Hike It certainly isn’t unheard of for a successful preacher to find his way into politics. In the early 1980s, Jerry Falwell changed the face of the Republican party with his Moral Majority. Pat Robertson ran for president in 1988, as did Mike Huckabee in 2008. Aspiring beyond the merely pastoral therefore seems very much within the purview of Reverend Billy’s act. “It’s the occasion for speaking in a visionary way,” s…
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…her Vijay Vhaskr Godugunuru was forced to return to India and then was transferred to Italy after pleading no contest to assaulting a 15-year-old girl while visiting friends in Bonifay, Fla,” according to the AP. “He now ministers to a parish in a medieval town of about 4,000 in Tuscany, where he hears confessions, celebrates Mass and works with children.” SNAP, The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests is pushing for action against four fo…
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…hereas the characters in Hereafter live in upper-class Paris, middle-class San Francisco, and the most caring and engaged child welfare system the world has ever known. But the differences are more than skin-deep, especially when it comes to religion. Hereafter goes out of its way to demean traditional religion (and esoteric nonsense) en route to its reluctant affirmation of the afterlife—if the film were a person, she’d be “spiritual, not religio…
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…nd to set a new kind of conversation in motion. When we met last month in San Francisco, I began our conversation by commenting on the scope of the book. Buruma, best known for his expertise on Japan, told me he’d written partly to contest the idea that religion doesn’t matter in the political life of East Asia. “It’s a different kind of religion,” he explained, “the idea of spiritual authority still plays a big role.” And, while it operates more…
Read More…tographic exhibit depicting similarly uninterpretable male intimacy was in San Francisco a few years ago. It was entitled Dear Friends, and a video essay by Richard Rodriguez walks the viewer brilliantly through the impossibility of knowing now how men one hundred and fifty years ago imagined themselves so touched by their closest friends. They lived before the Freudian revolution, you see. So they didn’t think of sexuality, just sex. And they pre…
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…he Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco recounts how this gay-positive church struggled with how to welcome a very attractive transgender woman who walked through their doors in the mid 1980s. Some straight men in the congregation felt odd when they learned the woman they’d felt attracted to had been born male, while some women did not want to share the bathroom with her. After a month or so this pe…
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