Religion Dispatches
…and others were careful not only to include people of every faith, but to welcome people who claim no faith but share a moral vision of a just society. He’s also not afraid to apply a little humor to his scriptural interpretation. He read from Jeremiah 22, where God says to go to the house of the king (a precursor to Moral Mondays protesters confronting those in power) to tell the king to do what is right and just. “Do no wrong or violence to the…
Read More
…yone else should be lynched and that American Muslims like her are fit and welcome to run for and hold public office. But he didn’t. He might have publicly called on the Facebook friend with whom he was agreeing about that lynching to also recant and apologize. But he didn’t. He might have further repented his call for this profoundly immoral and arguably criminal action. But he didn’t. Finally, he might also apologize to the Minnesota State Legis…
Read More
…omething to behold!). They may not be reconciled to my being gay, but they welcome me and my partner, our two sons, and the lesbian couple with whom we co-parent our children as members of their extended family. They—and I—finally decided that we would rely more on loving each other than figuring out who was right and who was wrong. That simple, hard decision has indeed reduced fear in our family, so I’ll watch and wait to see if that is what driv…
Read More…ferred to as a Christian nationalist, largely because he is the best-known promoter of the idea. But as a former vice chair of the Texas Republican Party and a frequent headliner at Christian right and Republican conclaves, he is also a Dominionist with considerable political reach. (The Jefferson Lies was on the New York Times best-seller list at the time it was withdrawn.) The Christian nationalist appeal is to, what historian Frank Lambert call…
Read More…Andrew Hacker said, what actually has changed are the public claims about welcome and racial justice, not living patterns. This is true of churches as well, as only 2.5% of mainline churches have no more than 80% of membership identified as the same race. Anything you had to leave out? I am afraid I left out some of the more complex nuances of gendered bodily proprieties and the way African American women and white women are habituated into diffe…
Read More…when he’s starving.” Americans responded in full force to these calls to “welcome the stranger.” Between 1975 and 2000, the United States resettled over one million refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, in a public-private endeavor funded in part by government but powered largely by private resources and the contributions of everyday Americans. Religious voluntary agencies—the organizations that have official contracts with the State Departm…
Read More
…rica. They’re not all bad. We want them to help us, and feel included, and welcome them because we want them to sort of be on our side and help to reduce the problem of terrorism. We need to work with the Muslim community.” Then you have on the other side the Trump rhetoric, or the more conservative rhetoric, which is, “They’re inherently evil. They’re dangerous to society.” On the right there is the essentializing of Muslims as potential terroris…
Read More
…n and emphasize that the meeting with Grassi was “in a spirit of kindness, welcome and dialogue” and not an endorsement of Grassi’s same-sex relationship. The last word in that statement from former Vatican press officer Rev. Frederico Lombardi is important to note. Like Francis, Lombardi is a Jesuit, and Francis’ continuous calls to dialogue among Catholics reflects their shared Jesuit theology. Shortly after being elected, Pope Francis told a gr…
Read More
…sake of the little ones. Many little ones will fall into this sin if LGBT promoters push them. And we also protest for the sake of the LGBT promoters themselves. For their sin will be multiplied by every abused child that they push into sodomy.” Orozco discounts the likelihood of such an appeal, since Belizean law generally bars “interested parties” from appealing if the parties themselves decline. Rather, his focus is on understanding the decisi…
Read More…the recent flap over Sojourners’ refusal to run the Believe Out Loud LGBT welcome ad. Obama’s hedging on the hiring discrimination issue is just like his hedging on marriage equality: the constitutional lawyer Barack Obama sees the issue quite clearly and fairly. But candidate and president Obama, faced with the advice of strategists and erstwhile supporters that “people of faith” might object, backpedals. For anyone who finds Democratic faith pa…
Read More