Religion Dispatches
…soldier, precious and beloved though he may be; and this closure is the all-too-natural consequence of a clumsy and calcified policy, which again and again resorts by default to the use of massive and exaggerated force, at every decisive juncture, where wisdom and sensitivity and creative thinking are called for instead. Why then haven’t we in the United States heard more about these oppositional voices? Because the reporting from Israel is highly…
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…an important transnational node in the growing movements of radicalized alt- and far-right ideologues. The Orthodox far-right in the United States are caught up in the global Culture Wars; whatever political ideology they align themselves with—fascism, populism, monarchism, and many of the other isms—they are typically homophobic, transphobic, anti-intellectual, and, more often than not, white supremacists—whether avowed or in spirit. A prominent…
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…en. In response to this reality, we’re following a practice started by the United Parish of Brookline [by] paying royalties for this music in the form of financial support of a local non-profit working with young people of color in Chicago. The threats forced us to take our Palm Sunday service online, but honestly, inside the walls of the church this Lent has been absolutely amazing. Our notoriety came at the very end of Lent. For the first five S…
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…ey had to confront the networked patriarchal web of faith traditions, faith-in-faith, and iterations of American nationalism. Without doubt, Tri-Faith America will have religious studies scholars debating Schultz’s approach to what “religion” is and it will have historians debating exactly how potent a problem tri-faith America really was. But for me, Tri-Faith America helped explain how and why at seventeen I used the language of “Judeo-Christian…
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…with unwanted same-sex attraction.” I asked Mrs. Slater if she considers a 14-year jail sentence a form of violence. She said that her organization has no position on that question saying, “FWI does not dictate to nations what specific laws people should enact or protect regarding homosexual sex or whether they should fine or jail individuals.” Since Slater said that FWI supports the right of nations to make laws in keeping with their religious a…
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…conservatives who are going to Africa, and they started spreading this anti-gay rhetoric across sub-Saharan Africa. We started getting a lot of statements from US evangelicals that homosexuality is wrong and that there is this Western agenda among gays to take over world. So it is coming from the West. Why is it a proxy war? In America, these politics have been going on for a long time—since the ’80s they have been used as a political tool to gain…
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…clarified in an email to that she, personally, does not “support the ‘same-sex marriage agenda’ for the LGB movement in the United States.” What Spitz makes clear in her paper is that despite religious opposition to marriage equality within the United States, if the economic livelihood of American businesses is ever threatened because of marriage inequality in the U.S. we can expect corporations to become the newest marriage equality advocates. I…
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…out a couple she had met recently who came across the border with their two-year-old child. They endured four hot days and four cold nights before being detained and sent back home. They will try again. To her, they are people of faith with a child. Our job, she proclaimed, is to “do all we can to care for this child who came to us from God.” Progressive bishops in denominations that have strong conservative wings have a nearly impossible job. Th…
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…Assembly, the provisions of the ICCPR are legally binding to its more than 165 parties. The detailed 52-paragraph statement, General Comment No. 34, is the outcome of two years of intense debate among representatives of governments and civil society organizations. The Committee’s previous comment on freedom of opinion and expression, in 1983, was only four paragraphs long. In addition to taking up such matters as treason, defamation of heads of s…
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…rs” and people living with HIV/AIDS. The law sparked a fresh round of house-to-house searches and arrests. Nigeria: Challenges of living under ‘Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act’ The Nigerian Tribune features a story on the challenges facing the country’s LGBT community: Nigeria’s Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act, of 2013, which took effect in January 2014, made a bad situation much worse for the already subdued Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Tr…
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