find cheap airline tickets anywhere 3/31 – 4/7 phone number 1-800-299-7264 | Search Results | Religion Dispatches

The War Within: Religion and Our Tangled Relationship with Our Bodies

By Michelle Lelwica

…at many of the difficult feelings I was experiencing in relation to my body-in-pain reminded me of the negativity I’d felt toward my body as a teenager, when I had an eating disorder. Of course, the situations were entirely different. My desire to control the arthritic pain of my middle-aged body had nothing to do with my adolescent yearning to be skinny. Yet the feeling of wanting to conquer, escape, or transcend my body was very familiar. This f…

What Irish Marriage Vote Means for Catholic Church; The Lonely Fight for Equality in Belize; Progress and Backlash in Tunisia; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…the Vatican to oppose or counter such statements implies approval; its hide-and-seek game essentially sanctions the persecution of sexual minorities in Africa and other parts of the world. Here at RD, Mary Hunt asked whether Ireland really “buried” the Catholic Church, writing, “Many people think the vote heralds the end of the Roman Catholic Church as we know it—but I think the reality might be more complicated.” We do know for sure that good Iri…

Restoring Dignity: The Employee Free Choice Act

By Peter Laarman

…aching. White Protestants (my peeps) have too often tended to cling to a by-your-bootstraps ethic of individual achievement, joined to a suspicion that there is something slightly sinister and foreign about union leaders and about the union concept of class solidarity. I grew up ten miles from the Kohler Company’s sprawling furnaces and factories in eastern Wisconsin during the seemingly endless and ultimately victorious struggle by the UAW to uni…

The Incredible Shrinking Catholic Church

By Paul Gorrell

…tning rod when it comes to the Church’s relations with Jews. While Catholic-Jewish relations had grown closer during the reign of Pope John Paul II, Benedict’s background as an ex-Hitler youth has created some suspicions about his true beliefs when it comes to the dignity of the Jewish religion. With this new development, the Rabbinate of Israel has severed ties with the Vatican and expressed concern about future relations with a Benedict-led Cath…

Global Religious Right Asks ‘How Far Can We Get?’; And More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…th attack on homosexuality Associated Press reports that presidential front-runner Moon Jae-in, a liberal candidate and former human rights lawyer, “outraged persecuted sexual minority groups by saying during a television debate that he opposes homosexuality.” According to AP, Moon made the comments in response to a conservative candidate “who argued gay soldiers were weakening the country’s military.” The New York Times cited critics who called M…

In the Papal Pocket: Benedict XVI and the Press

By Mary E. Hunt

…around in Washington DC and New York City, we hear about the “Pope-Soap-On-A-Rope” but not the people who work in Catholic schools for low wages. We see T-shirts for papal teddy bears, but no hint of the impact of the Vatican’s policy banning the use of condoms, even for those who are HIV-infected. Whether it is a Sunday morning talk show, the front page of a newspaper, or the evening news, I continue to be amazed at how little the Vatican press…

Are We Entering the End Times for Mainline Seminaries?

By Elesha Coffman

…significant investment resources, built through long years of serving well-to-do constituents. Many of these schools also own impressive buildings on coveted plots of land. According to the Association of Theological Schools, denominational (a category roughly equivalent to mainline) Protestant seminaries derived 37 percent of their revenue from investments and depreciation in 2013, a substantially higher percentage than either Roman Catholic or…

For Conservatives, the Future Looks Dim… and Gay

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…g homosexuality as “a destructive sin [and] something to be ashamed of. Out-and-proud homosexualism – far from being a human right – is actually a human wrong.” Others, like David Lane who, writes for World Net Daily and is funded by the certified hate group the American Family Association, are writing op-eds calling for America to return to being a “Christian nation.” Christians must be retrained to war for the Soul of America and quit believing…

Is Twitter Doing Enough to Remove Extremist Content? An Ex-Employee Weighs In

By Sofi Hersher

…tools it would still constitute one of the world’s largest games of “whack-a-mole.” In light of near universal calls for Twitter, Facebook, Ask.fm and other social media sites to suppress extremist content from public view, a number of questions arise. Some are practical: how many Twitter employees speak or read Arabic or Urdu or Farsi, etc.? Should these requests be given preferential treatment over other offensive content like child pornography…

Conservative Evangelical Eric Metaxas, Doing Twitter Theology, Claims ‘Jesus Was White’

By Eric Vanden Eykel

…te this, Metaxas’s tweet has been severely “ratioed,” which means that the number of responses far exceeds the number of “likes” and retweets. This is generally an indication that a tweet’s contents are either deeply controversial or profoundly ignorant (or both). In short: Twitter users have pushed back on Metaxas, and they’ve pushed back hard. In response he’s deployed a Trump-ian combination of backpedaling and doubling down on his initial clai…