Religion Dispatches
…Plan” campaign. Alston said he hopes to organize 500 community screenings between now and the film’s official release in the fall. Robinson says he has found that nothing works better to change hearts and minds than LGBT people telling their own stories—or allies telling the story of someone they love, such as a child, aunt or uncle, or friend. He recalls making a too-flippant comment at some event asking how straight white men could “get it” in…
Read More…killed the government’s plans for the national vote and called again for a free vote in the parliament. CNN has profiled some of the couples who are waiting, among them a man and woman who pledged four years ago not to marry until their gay friends could. BuzzFeed’s Lane Sainty reports: Many conservative commentators have characterised the LGBTI community as childish, petulant, and anti-democratic for opposing a national vote on marriage. But Grei…
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…l church in the mid-1990s—he’s used elective office to advance a rightwing religious agenda. Throughout his political career, Pence has ardently opposed abortion, gay rights, trade unions, and environmental legislation. He has championed deregulation as well as for tax cuts for the wealthy, and a free market that neither bails out failing companies nor assists unemployed workers. Is Pence the last gasp of the baby boom hegemony—a misguided generat…
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…Democrats opposed tariffs both as an imposition on the functioning of the free market and as a way to starve the federal government of revenue so it couldn’t do things like expand infrastructure. Throughout much of the 1880s, the Democrats used a series of procedural maneuvers to hamstring Congress, delaying progress on reforms the country needed in order to keep pace with the industrial revolution and the increasing urbanization and interconnect…
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…a for a book that subverts the way we usually think about the relationship between faith and practice. What if, instead of starting in the clouds with a bunch of esoteric, lofty propositions about some God way up in heaven, we begin on the ground, in the trenches, amid the dirt and grime of our everyday earthly lives? What if, rather than saying, “God is A, B, and C” and trusting the trickle-down sanctification of free-market theism to make us goo…
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…c that he wanted from me. It took me a long time to be able to distinguish between these quite different commands. I suspect that in the end, I disappointed him. He also disappointed me. Perhaps this disappointment was the greatest gift. Because he never claimed me as his, I remained free. In the years after I entered the academy, Jacob Neusner never acknowledged or responded to any of my scholarly work, although there were many times when I would…
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…concentrate on—wait for it—sex and marriage-related issues and “religious freedom,” which is also focused on the pelvic zone. And as if to prove how tone-deaf they are, on Sunday the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops kicked off its fourth annual “Fortnight for Freedom” religious liberty extravaganza, which runs through July 4. Surprisingly (for an event that marries an archaic English expression to a vague nod to American Independence and Catho…
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…ual information and sexual representations, and expanded sexual rights and freedoms for most Americans. How that would play out on a Supreme Court with a conservative majority is uncertain. But rights and freedoms that are potentially at stake are concrete and bear directly upon the health of millions of Americans. At its core, Comstockery maintains that individuals cannot and should not be trusted when it comes to sexual and reproductive matters;…
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…y applied set of economic and political policies premised on the idea that free markets secure freedom and flourishing. Within this framework, nation-states ideally serve as subordinate enablers of capitalism as it forges a renewed multicultural village. This is the subtext for advertising campaigns that advance a not-so-subtle message that conspicuous consumption initiates subjects into an avant-garde multicultural global public. In a context in…
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…advantage of the crisis to restructure the economy in favor of the radical free market. It was this period—the end of the 1960s and early 1970s—when the business community embarked on a war of ideas to take back the country from the “radicals” who had been undermining faith in the free market. One of their targets for conversion was the country’s religious leadership. Using both the carrot (invitations to all-expenses paid weekend retreats where t…
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