Religion Dispatches
…us Supreme Court called the restauranteur’s defense “patently frivolous.”) Today, there is a similar but not identical logic in some of the controversies on which I have previously reported, especially those of the baker who wouldn’t create a custom cake for a gay wedding and the foster care agency that refused to place children with a lesbian couple. The challenge today is how to distinguish between, on the one hand, attempts to license discrimin…
Read More…of anti-Semitism and white supremacy, no matter where you are in the world today). Unlike these symbols that are based in reality, however, a thoughtful investigation into the “black mass” would have revealed that this is actually a symbol in search of a reality. Boston University professor David Frankfurter, in his award-winning 2006 book Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History, argues that, when we apply the mos…
Read More…. evangelicals must take responsibility for David’s blood!” In a statement today, Political Research Associates condemned the murder and demanded an end to “the export of homophobia to Uganda by American conservatives.” “Kato’s murder is a heavy blow to the international human rights community,” said Rev. Kapya Kaoma, the director of PRA’s Project on Religion and Sexuality. “Those U.S conservatives who have lit the brushfire of homophobia in Afric…
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…legal traditions, Islamic or otherwise, discussed consent in the way we do today. In the past, she said, “we don’t hear about consent in marriage, or in relationships where sex is lawful. What we do hear and read about is that anyone, slave or free, who is harmed, can take that case to a judge. A woman could go to a court and say her husband hit her, bruised her—she could get compensation.” In the Prophetic period, consent was often passive: Expec…
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…t those kinds of things with religious and ritual significance. With diets today, there seems to be a lot of fear involved, too. It’s terrifying to live in a place where the causes of diseases like Alzheimer’s, autism, or ADHD, or the causes of weight gain, are mysterious. So what we do is come up with certain causes for the things that we fear. If we’re trying to avoid things that we fear, why would we invent a world full of toxins that don’t rea…
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…action physically to replace them as inhabitants of the holy land. But who today knows what the Canaanites and Philistines reported about such self-serving Hebrew claims? In their turn, Christians likewise see themselves as superseding Jews as the Chosen People, establishing a New Israel, allegedly justified in doing so by the genius of Christian “fulfillments” of ancient Jewish prophecies, matched only by the uncanny anticipation those Jewish pro…
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…with lesbians and gay persons being called queer in the pejorative sense. Today that term has been embraced, not by all, but by quite a few. Persons within the community self-identify, and by self-identifying they say they don’t want to be put into a box. They don’t want to use these binary categories of male and female, straight or homosexual. So when one says queer nowadays, one is intentionally pushing back against the binary conversations tha…
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…in 2018. Support for trans boys competing on teams with cis boys is at 46% today, down from 61% in 2018. Here, too, religious (non)affiliation is a highly significant factor. As the report notes: The same trend occurs across all religious groups, with white evangelical Protestants least supportive of either male (26%) or female (8%) transgender students participating in high school athletic events with cisgender students who share their gender ide…
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…me of our ideas about what American yoga is and what it means to Americans today. Although we tend to associate yoga’s entrance into the United States with the counterculture of the 1960s and especially the Beatles, gurus from India began to disseminate their creative and innovative renditions of yoga to Americans well before then. The Science of the Experience of God Paramahansa Yogananda, founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship, was the secon…
Read More…rates calls made since 2011 for Obama to rescind the Bush executive order. Today’s letter, in contrast to yesterday’s letter from over 50 legal scholars, is more focused on framing religious freedom as a core American value that is protected, rather than endangered, by rejecting the religious exemption. The legal scholars focused more on constitutional law and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in making the case that neither Free Exercise Clau…
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