Religion Dispatches
…ntact with politics in the public sphere. David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam, authors of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, wrote in a New York Times op-ed last summer that what makes the Tea Party movement so unpopular to a large segment of the population is the conservative impulse to mix religion and politics. Americans, they suggest, oppose the mingling of the two. And yet Campbell and Putnam’s own data show that the major…
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…ihad and trying to lure recruits. None of the LGBT people who spoke with Reuters about threats they had received had gone to the police, which they feared would “out” them and invite further harassment. Said one, “In the eyes of the law we are criminals, in the eyes of our religion we are sinners and from the viewpoint of society we are perverts.” Police have charged an Islamist militant in the killings, and Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan said the…
Read More…couples were originally selected but visa issues held back three of them. Putin: God made me perfect Vladimir Putin declared in an interview with an Italian newspaper that he has never made a mistake because God built him to be perfect. The anti-gay politician made the claim in an interview with Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. He was asked: “Is there an action that you most regret in your life, something that you consider a mistake and woul…
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…arxism and communism,” for which he blames the Jews, who “deserve nothing but hell.” Indeed, it’s no surprise Earnest singles out “cultural Marxism and communism” with such vitriol given how obsessed today’s conservatives are with socialism. For many millennials and grassroots activists who are eager to address entrenched inequality and build a new progressive consensus, socialism has become quite appealing. Popular elected officials, like Bernie…
Read More…o to assure softball questions, few dissident voices, and reverent talk about the number of ciboria necessary to serve communion in baseball stadiums. And, we are all supposed to know what ciboria are (for the record, they are the goblet-shaped metal vessels that hold the hosts—that is, the wafers—used for communion). Catholic terminology is about the only thing used liberally in these exercises. Television hosts like Tim Russert fairly swoon over…
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…t exists, and there’s certainly a “news of the weird” part of any story about an 18-child family. But whether people approach such news as something freakish or something beautiful, there’s so much more to the conviction than the novelty of such large families. I think most readers would be shocked and surprised, as I was, to read what a dramatic reversal of women’s rights the Quiverfull and patriarchy movements desire, and what smart organizing a…
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…and history. Grand statements about what “all religions” say or believe about anything—especially about such a complex phenomenon as human desire and sexuality—are not just unhelpful, they’re impossible. Nonetheless, this has not prevented many Christian opponents of homosexuality from asserting that all religions condemn homosexuality. This assertion is patently false; it is not even the case that all Christianities condemn homosexuality. The myt…
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…t of the country experienced the demographic decline both in terms of absolute numbers and the percentage of ethnic minorities. Furthermore, the number of people who refused to declare their ethnicity rose to nearly 16.5 million—nearly 11 percent of the total Russian population in 2021—according to the official numbers. When read against the dwindling numbers of some of Russia’s largest ethnic minority groups, such as Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvash, Av…
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…of commission, the polls can be wrong, and anything can happen two weeks out. But I expect that Catholics will vote for Obama in large numbers. I am not sure this is because of or even in spite of his position on abortion. Rather, I think it may be a sign that the centrality of abortion for Catholics is over. Even the bishops in their nuanced statement did not insist that any single issue ought to determine one’s vote. And even if they had, I thi…
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…sful forger in American history, having sold dozens of fake documents to a number of institutions for a total of over a million dollars. Hofmann’s is a story that is so enthralling that it would capture the nation’s admiration were it not for the outright fraud and tragic reality that it resulted in lost lives, broken homes, and devastated communities. This Wednesday, March 3, Netflix will release Murder Among the Mormons, a three-part documentary…
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