Religion Dispatches
…plane. Geller rose to media fame in the 1970s for his alleged ability to bend spoons with his mind. He’s hinted he could help find the missing airliner by using the power of remote viewing, a form of ESP….
Read More…ven, and cited by numerous organizations to be extremely harmful. We are causing irreversible damage and we are hiding behind our religious beliefs to do it. The Seventh-day Adventist church is one of the largest protestant denominations in Uganda and has a growing number of new converts in East Africa. In 2010, in the heat of the “Kill the Gays Bill” media frenzy, the Vice President of the Seventh-day Adventist African Conference vocally supporte…
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…nd his followers from decapitating hundreds of thousands of Muslims for refusing to recite the Hindu nationalist mantra “Bharat Mata Ki Jai,” meaning Honor to Mother India. (Some Indian Muslims consider the mantra incompatible with their religious commitments, since it personifies India as the Goddess). The consequences of a sustained campaign against India’s religious minorities could be devastating: India has more than 200 million religious mino…
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…lonial authorities wanted to build religious categories, Gottschalk said, “using the best tools they have. And those, in the minds of 18th and 19th century Brits, are scientific tools.” Around the same time that Carolus Linnaeus was developing a taxonomic system for organisms, authorities were coming up with ways to categorize their subjects based on body and belief. Social scientific classifications have a tendency to eclipse the way that people…
Read More…—where “speak” means “perform physiological processes that can be detected using medical equipment”—and somehow this “speech” amounts to an opinion which (oh, hey!) neatly matches the opinions espoused by Voices From The Womb. Which is an, er, interesting way of showing respect to a party whom one claims to believe is ethically and legally a person. Using them as props in political pageantry, I mean, or imposing political opinions on them which th…
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…he Occupation, and thus its obsolescence. Some on the (so-called) Left are using terms such as “shrinking the Occupation” to replace “end the Occupation.” In other words, we just have to be better occupiers to feel less like the oppressors that we are. Thus, a true irony emerges: despite the threat to democracy that these new policies represent, this shift of focus from ending the Occupation is the true death of Israeli democracy as it’s essential…
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…white, evangelical Christianity is clearly closely associated with QAnon. Using data that was gathered throughout 2021, PRRI recently observed: “two-thirds of QAnon believers (66%) say that being Christian is important to being truly American, compared to half of QAnon doubters (50%), 43% of all Americans, and one in five QAnon rejecters (20%).” That is, a sizable majority of QAnon believers see being a Christian as a critical part of their ident…
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…, we will lose the battle to be independent.” The statement that mainly focusing on the threat to American democracy as a news organization would make it “partisan” is bizarre—and a result of the media’s fetishization of “bipartisanship,” long after it has ceased to exist, because Republicans have refused to engage in regular politics within the bounds of democracy. If being “partisan” when it comes to the existence of democracy is a problem for n…
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…with babies and women cooking, yes, but now we have a new addition: women using power tools and women as teachers in a classroom. So women aren’t confined to the kitchen alone—they’re called by God to be productive in many ways. But we learn soon enough that, according to Merkle, women must always have their focus on their home, their husbands, their children, and their community in order to embrace true femininity. While this might sound wholeso…
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…with any religion. However, scholars of religion have long maintained that using church attendance as a bellwether for interpreting the influence of Christianity on American politics leads to sophomoric conclusions about the declining influence of religion on our public square. Thus, in his quest to fashion a new American conservatism, Mr. Hochman misses the mark by concluding that religious conservatives are no longer a core demographic of the GO…
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