Religion Dispatches
…o get confronted with this kind of crap? Hold firm to the faith and tell them that if they don’t like social or economic justice, they shouldn’t just find a new parish, they should get a new religion. Objectivism would be the name of that idol….
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…at the song is saying. Small wonder that the band’s raucous, hand-clapping new single (and another highlight of its Bonnaroo performance) bears the title “Gobbledigook.” Since its release, dedicated followers of Sigur Rós have been filling Internet discussion boards trying to parse the song’s lyrics. They may be missing the point. Sigur Rós seems to realize that what gives music and musical performance its power is something untranslatable, someth…
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…on–are reminiscent of the Nazi assaults on the German trans community. The new playbooks also use the same narratives the Christian Right used on gay people in the past, the same made-up logic about transness or gayness as a “social contagion.” Because gay or trans people can’t reproduce, their lie goes, they have to “indoctrinate” children with their “perversion.” Framing a marginalized group as predators accomplishes two things: it demonizes the…
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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…
Read More…ab.” Isle of Man: Marriage equality now in effect As of Friday, July 22, a new law allows same-sex couples to legally marry or choose a civil partnership. The Guardian’s Helen Pidd reports: Church of England ministers do not have to marry gay couples under the new law. The island’s bishop, who sits in the Manx parliament’s upper chamber, was one of a handful of representatives to oppose equal marriage… [Chief Minister Allan] Bell was one of a numb…
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…an ideological understanding of the Gospel that the Gospel is like a penal code.” The hardliners on divorce were backed by an open letter to the synod signed by 48 conservatives, including prominent Catholics like natural law scholar Robert George and former US ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon, but also conservative protestants like Rick Warren and signees from the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council, which suggests that…
Read More…dominant tradition in modern Judaism. Nor do many Christians get that the New Testament sees Pharisees through a partisan lens, as it were. They were rivals to the nascent Jesus movement, and often their rhetorical targets. Second and more positively, Buttigieg speaks of the need to represent all comers, religious or not. Good on him for that. Much of the discussion around faith and politics brackets non-believers and the religiously unaffiliated…
Read More…rom Northern Cyprus after he posted a provocative video on social media on New Year’s Eve that reportedly said “Are you still celebrating the New Year while so many journalists are under arrest, so many children are being harassed or raped, corruption and bribery are over the top, and bigots share crap on the streets together with religious annunciators. Drown in your crap, Turkey.” He has since called his comments a “satire against discrimination…
Read More…o take but two bellwether issues. If the swing voters in the swing states knew about these stances, they’d be less likely to vote for Romney, even though he won the first debate in convincing, alpha-dog style. So it’s obviously in Romney’s interest to leave that stuff for the base and hush it up when it comes to winning over the middle. But that partisan preference doesn’t explain why the president never mentioned social or religious issues, and w…
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…demonstrates, are “myths,” or paradigmatic models of reality that help us code our visions of the world and inform our social vocabularies, conceptions of self, and varying personal relationships. One’s views about the origins of humanity signal special allegiance, at the moment, to a broad social collective and a general worldview. In short, whether you are a die-hard secularist or an adamant creationist, you subscribe to a large and complex nar…
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