Religion Dispatches
…means that truth, insofar as any human can grasp it, is inherently fluid. Today’s fixed set of demands may easily seem like tomorrow’s folly. Gandhi’s program was especially vague in the earliest years of his work, in South Africa. To demand a detailed list of specifics from today’s Occupiers would be like making the same demand of Gandhi in the 1890s. Yet Gandhi must have known intuitively, even then, an essential truth he would later articulate…
Read More…terms like “Obamosque?” Or this photograph on the Special Guests website? Today Special Guests is also promoting the special guest of Scott Wheeler, a long-time operative of right-wing smear campaigns against Democratic candidates and office-holders. Wheeler is the executive director of the National Republican Trust PAC, which during the 2008 presidential campaign ran incendiary ads attempting to link Obama to terrorism. He’s a veteran of other e…
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…marriage in Homosexuality in Islam. And, of course this is a big issue in today’s news. I admit I sometimes find the marriage equality movement—and the movement for inclusion in the military—paradoxical. On the one hand, of course I want the full rights of citizenship and I am lucky enough to be living in New York! On the other hand, I think of these as two very conservative institutions that got critiqued in serious ways by progressives in my li…
Read More…olars signing today’s letter and oppose an exemption, as I reported here.) Today’s legal scholars’ letter takes issue with the legal analysis in the June 25 letter, specifically its interpretation of religious exemptions under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in employment. The accommodation under Title VII permits religious employers to hire only candidates of its own faith, but it does not, as the June 25 letter…
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…blical requirements, however, he did not view it as inherently immoral. By promoting McDowell, and by extension Rushdoony, Barton promotes a “biblical worldview” in which slavery is in some circumstances acceptable. This worldview (like his discussion of the three-fifths rule, which minimizes the rule’s dehumanization of slaves) diminishes the dehumanization of slavery in general by explicitly arguing that God condones it in certain circumstances….
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…ate–side as Arkansas governor that drew the ire of the state’s hard-right. Today, in the culmination of the last eight years of his rebranding to the right, Huckabee played down any pastoral political persona in favor of an angry ideologue who thinks the government is a tyrannical overlord bent on “criminalizing Christianity:” [W]e’ve lost our way morally. We have witnessed the slaughter of over 55 million babies in the name of choice, and are now…
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…, Lutheran, and most Protestant, including evangelical, mission is defined today by a servant model. Modern Christians express their discipleship through medical, educational, agricultural service to those who need it, because they see the fully human Christ in all the faces of the needy and marginalized. The Christian martyrs in Afghanistan called themselves “the hands and feet of Jesus, not his mouth.” There is a lesson here for “progressive rel…
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…tian lives saved by this groundbreaking book,” comments Christian Feminism Today on its website. An earlier book, Women, Men, and the Bible, attracted widespread attention in 1977, giving hope to women raised in conservative denominations that required women’s submission to men. Mollenkott spoke at two of the first conferences of evangelical feminists: one in 1973 at Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver and another in 1975 to the newly founded E…
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…of things. And when I was about to turn 40, I became interested in health promotion and disease prevention from a personal standpoint. As I read recommendations regarding health promotion and good healthy forms of living, it occurred to me that we were in fact reinventing the wheel. All these recommendations and so forth seem to be reiterations of how people were living before agriculture. And then it occurred to me that our genetics have changed…
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…story of the women’s movement and feminism to illuminate American troubles today, to recall the longer battle lines drawn amongst women’s organizations on opposing religious and political lines. This absence of feminist thought and contributions is equally evident in debate between science and religion on spiritual experiences, or the neuropsychology of religious experience. Rarely, in these discussions, does one find feminist studies of science o…
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