Religion Dispatches
…ne of evangelical conviction,” is the focus on international Christianity. Number five on the CT list: Christians flee Iraq and Gaza: About 13,000 Christians—or one in two—left Mosul in October. In Gaza, churches where hundreds worshiped until recently are attended by less than a dozen. Historic Christian communities are becoming history. 4.) TOP TEN ONION RELIGION STORIES: “Jewish Elders Lift Ham Ban.” For instance. 5.) TOP TEN ABUSES OF RELIGION…
Read More
…ly dismantled some of the speakers’ Leave it to Beaver idealizations of the 1950s as a time when women were universally protected). Though only just under 3,000 women have actually signed the document since its unveiling on October 11, the fact that it exists, and the campaign to gather such a large showing of public support, reveals something important about this movement: that its followers don’t view themselves simply as a remnant of polite, ch…
Read More
…ews will likely take Spain and Portugal by storm…Imagine if just 5% or even 10% of Spanish and Portuguese descendants of Jews were to return to Judaism. It would mean an additional 500,000 to 1 million Jews in the world.” Interestingly enough, one of those who has found Freund’s work fascinating is James M. Hutchens of the Christian Zionist “Jerusalem Connection,” who has been promoting the piece. Why? Bartholomew: “I can see why Freund would enth…
Read More
…do not exist and are not even entertained as a possibility” (xiii, 3-6, 36, 113, 304). Interestingly, Chopra’s utopic vision bears uncanny resemblance to the heavenly realm of eternally youthful bodies Augustine imagined centuries ago (Augustine believed that bodies in heaven would be resurrected at the “perfect age” of 33—i.e., the age of Christ). You might say that Chopra’s fantasy of ageless physiques secularizes/updates Christianity’s immortal…
Read More…ng forward a Marriage Equality Bill, which will be debated in the Senate on 18 June, and will go to a vote on 12 November.” BuzzFeed’s Lester Feder examined the potential impact of the vote in other countries, including Italy — the only Western European nation that provides no legal recognition to same-sex couples – where Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has promised a vote on civil union legislation by the end of the summer, and Germany, where Prime M…
Read More
…,” reports AP. Some 50,000 men were convicted under the legislation between 1949 and 1969. At Handelsblatt Global, Barbara Woolsey examines why marriage equality has not yet been achieved in Germany, beyond the personal opposition of Chancellor Angela Merkel, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor. Woolsey notes of the post-war government in West Germany kept paragraph 175 of the criminal code, which criminalized homosexuality, in place: The party bloc…
Read More…e past quarter century has been its laser-like focus on a relatively small number of interrelated issues. The religious left would need to define its agenda priorities clearly and precisely in order to earn concrete policy victories. Nor am I convinced that we should write an obituary for the religious right. As Dionne notes in Souled Out, “The end of the religious right does not signal a decline in evangelical Christianity” (p. 4). Far from it: e…
Read More
…sic investigators to uncover his forgeries. Hofmann was arrested in January 1986, pled guilty in January 1987, and sentenced to a life in prison. But even if the legal story climaxed surprisingly quickly, significant legacies remained long afterward. Pressure mounts from all sides Mark Hofmann didn’t create the wars over Mormon origins, but he certainly escalated them. Historians who’d been working to revise traditional narratives, including the f…
Read More…th, for both are part of my devotion to Allah). They do have a substantial number of women included, so I would not complain on that count. But, here’s the thing: there are no women under the category of Muslim intellectuals. Apparently women don’t think. So it is even harder to adjust to the loss of these three men whose intellectual contributions helped to shape the ways we think about and in fact live Islam today; both for women and for men. I…
Read More…olleague Hussein Rashid pointed out in this must-read piece), Mormons, the number two most disliked religion in America, have no business contributing to public rage against the number one most disliked religion in America. Nor in trafficking in falsehoods like “Islam is an ideology, not a religion,” a line I’ve been hearing from a few Mormons in recent days. Islam is in fact a religion for which Mormon leaders from the time of George A. Smith…
Read More