Religion Dispatches
Religion Dispatches, your favorite indie religion site (and go-to source for awkward dinner conversation starters) is nominated for a 2015 Webby Award in the Religion & Spirituality category. We are thrilled! The Webbys are the Oscars of the Internet. We’ve been honored with a Webby nomination a number of times before and it never gets old. But… we confess we’re starting to nurture a bit of a Susan Lucci complex — always a nominee, never (yet) a…
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…erous. It’s also iconic—the world’s preeminent adventure sports pilgrimage site. And that iconic status somehow makes it easier for us to overlook that danger. The results are ethically fraught. Is the risk worth the reward? Are affluent climbers culpable for Sherpa deaths? Is $2,000-$6,000, the going salary for Sherpas, fair pay for one of the most dangerous jobs on earth? The power imbalance between locals and foreigners is especially apparent t…
Read More…uslim kingdom and a Spanish feminist was expelled after a pro-gay protest, officials said on Thursday.” On Tuesday authorities arrested two French members of the controversial feminist campaign Femen after they protested topless in front of a Rabat landmark against Morocco’s treatment of gays. The women, one of whom had the slogan “in gay we trust” written in black on her torso, were expelled Tuesday evening. The men arrested for “an obscene act”…
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…f ever increasing pluralism. So when Campolo posted a statement on his web site this week announcing that he had changed his mind about homosexuality and was “urging the church to be more welcoming” to LGBTQ people, it was a big deal. A very big deal. In his statement, Campolo, a sociologist who earned a doctorate from Temple University, said in part: As a social scientist, I have concluded that sexual orientation is almost never a choice and I ha…
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…a recent college graduate, grandparents, mothers, friends and clergy. The site of this white terrorist attack intimates a broader attack on the idea of black freedom. Emanuel Church embodies a storied and triumphant history in the American south. Historically, this place of transformative faith invested capital and bodies in the work of black emancipation. We must remember that Denmark Vesey was a founder of Emanuel: there is a legacy of unfounde…
Read More…ful federal authority but Alabama is not one of them,” Moore told the news site AL.com earlier this year. “A federal judge,” said Moore, “has no authority to overturn a state constitutional amendment in the face of a state court’s opinion on the same matter.” In February, when Moore’s Wallace-esque stance made news, he was supported by the Alabama Republican Party chair, Terry Lathan, who had just returned from a trip to Israel, which, he wrote in…
Read More…Scott explains in The Politics of the Veil that the Muslim headscarf is a site where questions about divergent cultural standards—particularly those standards pertaining to sex—could play out. According to Scott, “French norms of sexual conduct [are] taken to be both natural and universal.” In contrast, she argues, “Muslim sexuality [is represented as] unnatural and oppressive when compared to an imagined French way of doing sex.” Similarly, the…
Read More…h, became the first openly gay British royal. Russia: Court bans LGBT news site Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports that a Siberian court has banned one of the country’s most popular LGBT news sites “without warning.” Uganda: Police block pride march before it starts Police blocked supporters of LGBT equality from convening on a beach and told them to leave the area, reports BuzzFeed’s David Mack. Minister for Ethics and Integrity Simon Lokodo…
Read More…ing the ICEJ event to a “troubling trend” of Christian control of Old City sites. Haaretz reports that the group has put up posters in Jerusalem saying that “attempts to portray the vigil as harmless are deliberate acts of deception on the part of missionaries who seek to attract Jews and strengthen the church’s hold on holy sites in the Old City.” To be clear, ICEJ’s promotional materials do not explicitly invite Jews to join the prayer vigil, bu…
Read More…n of other sources of information, like Fox News at first, but also now websites like Breitbart, 4chan, Infowars, and others. The goal of “fake news” and “alternative facts” goes beyond providing different data. Their purpose is actually to destroy the notion that there could be impartial news and objective facts. Maria Bustillos calls this endgame “dismediation,” “a form of propaganda that seeks to undermine the medium by which it travels.” It wi…
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