Religion Dispatches
…on proposed by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, an organization that promotes intelligent design. David Fowler, head of the conservative Christian Family Action Council of Tennessee, which is affiliated with Focus on the Family, and is one of the bill’s primary lobbyists. In defending the bill’s language, he has tried to draw on comparisons to the famous Scopes monkey trial that took place 86 years ago in his state. “…[T]oday’s evolutionary…
Read More…y Sherrod video was. The video is at best innocuous, but Palin, in her Fox News role as mean girl racist cheerleader, is still beating Breitbart’s fake drums of scandal even after his death. Palin’s offensive word salad on Sean Hannity was a Tour de farce in her attempt to turn people away from the HBO movie Game Change which focuses in on the choice of Palin as the vice presidential candidate and the trouble that ensued from bringing her on the R…
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…p structure. Of course, you can’t blame groups like this for being wary of new volunteers. M: That’s true, especially considering how the Reagan Administration paid spies to infiltrate the Sanctuary Movement. But if they depend on volunteers and recruit them…? L: The cliquishness was not the only problem. The leadership structure seemed almost nonexistent (supposedly it was consensus-based, but volunteers were out of the loop). This blocked opport…
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…cy in some detail for Religion Dispatches. To add a few more examples, the New York Times has established a permanent home for columnists like Ross Douthat, who warns of the “grim data” on declining religiosity. Rather than establish clearly what’s so grim about it, the article makes two seemingly contradictory accusations against people who’ve left the faith. First, Douthat warns of encroaching “scientism” which, in this context, is code for fail…
Read More…e made in the committee hearing on the bill last week. “If you look at the code, these codes are dealing with illegal acts. Now, abortion is a legal act. So this has got nothing to do with abortion.” Here is the bill in its entirety: FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to expand the definition of justifiable homicide to provide for the protection of certain unborn children. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA: Section 1. Th…
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…ning) than on religion, defined in terms of religious institutions. Ethics codes, like the Code of Ethics for Nurses of the American Nurses Association, emphasize the importance of patients’ spiritual well-being and the NANDA International, which develops language around nursing diagnoses, recognizes three diagnoses related to spirituality and spiritual distress. In medical and broader public discourse about religion, spirituality, and medicine, i…
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…This moved swiftly into the revision of Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code in 1935, which “would amount to a death sentence for gay men,” according to historian Andrea Carlo. The banning of books on the LGBTQIA+ experience and the closing of libraries; the legislation and platforms against transgender healthcare and LGBTQIA+ rights; these all draw from that playbook. All of these components–physical assaults, book banning, and legislation–are…
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…—often more adroitly than their modern counterparts. In his Mishneh Torah (Code of Law), Maimonides explicitly advocated the position that women should stay mostly in their homes. The kabbalistic literature now so popular in modern Israel is in many ways worse. We have evidence that in the heyday of Safed in the sixteenth century a “council for rectifying sins” (va’ad le tikun avonot) was established to seek out and corporally punish those who wer…
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…ent months about helping anti-equality activists in Mexico and launching a new chapter in Nigeria. Last Tuesday, the group wrote about the assistance it is providing Christian groups who are opposing the advance of marriage equality in Taiwan. BuzzFeed, the polling firm Ipsos, and the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law collaborated on a survey of public attitudes toward transgender people in 23 countries. (ILGA released a mapping report…
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…tablishment was based on birth and breeding,” David Brooks explains, “this new establishment rests on education and career.” While the Upper East Side doyennes will still make an appearance, the overarching spirit of the pages is determinedly representative. Same-sex couples and mixed-race couples, old money couples and new money couples, couples who like tennis and couples who like cooking classes—everyone is there. The reader then becomes convin…
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