Religion Dispatches
…ght happen to us as any sort of backlash. I’m hearing none of that now the way I did, say, after 9/11. Right now, it’s primarily anger that this happened and really searching for ways that the Muslim community can help. This anger is not about the damage to the Muslim community, but the damage to America, and how can Muslims, as Americans, help repair that damage. Eboo Patel, a member of the president’s Faith-Based Advisory Council has a suggestio…
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…he gives us his biblical worldview spin: the person who’s right about the number is the person who knows who made the number and for what purpose. Neither person in the meme can know the truth of whether it’s a six or a nine until the author of the meme tells them. In other words, while there might be many worldviews, only God can truly tell us the truth of the world. Thus the only worldview that’s correct is the one that acknowledges God made th…
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…priests and nuns carried out most of Church ministry. Since then, as their numbers declined, lay men and women in great numbers have committed themselves to work alongside priests and nuns. This partnership is essential for the Church’s mission to thrive. The Jesuit School of Theology is preparing ministerial leaders—Jesuit, religious, and lay—to work together as partners for tomorrow’s Church.” No Hierarchy of Abuse There’s a critical disconnect…
Read More…immediate safety or security. Speaking out against a measure half a world away seems like an impossible task to get people riled up about – but we must. The religious right is using its influence in Africa to create the society it hasn’t been able to create here – a theocracy where gays and lesbians are disappeared – in very permanent ways. Even among the gay and lesbian community it can be easy to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to the struggles…
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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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…nly gay former US ambassador to the country. The New York Times profiled a number of everyday people, Muslims and Christians, who are taking part in legal challenges to the Trump administration overs its executive orders banning entry into the U.S. from a number of countries. Paul Harrison, an American man engaged to an Iranian man is among the individuals profiled: Like the other plaintiffs, the couple veer between dread and hope with each succes…
Read More…st only, in most cases, at the mercy of advertising revenues. So while the number of voices has increased, the number of well-funded reporters has decreased. It’s reassuring to think that as print news takes a hit, online media will be there to fill the gap, but the story isn’t quite that simple. Content is certainly being generated, but it’s proving no easy replacement for print. Many publications weren’t initially eager to embrace the online wor…
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…rtheless put the number at roughly 338,000. I am willing to work with this number until a better one comes along. Of this number, roughly 8,000 congregations claim upwards of 1,000 members; most are smaller, indeed most are much smaller. My concept is this: I think we can create a Christian Honor Corps (CHC) of perhaps 10,000 persons. Persons like myself who take our responsibility to monitor Christian extremist thought seriously and who are willi…
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…ublican party. The candidates who went about it in the most blatant, crass way, might have lost—but they weren’t kicked out by their party. The lines have been drawn clearly: The Republican Party has declared “the Left” not just their political opponent, but mortal enemy, a deeply un-American force that threatens the very core of “real” (read White, Christian) America, which must be stopped. They will continue to fight about how to achieve this in…
Read More…Christ of Latter-day Saints, it’s pretty safe to assume that a significant number of “Concerned Citizens of the United States” are Mormon. But so too are a significant number of undocumented immigrants living in the American West. As we’ve reported here at RD, the Church’s strongest growth over the last decade has been among Latino populations, and almost 4.5 million Mormons worldwide are Spanish-speaking. Economic downtimes and anti-immigrant out…
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