Religion Dispatches
…e. The government has no business trying to convince you otherwise. You’re welcome to sit down. We invited you to stand, but no one made you. But if you do believe, I would ask you, personally and not on behalf of the government, to take a moment to thank Him, for the many gifts you believe you have received from Him, including the opportunity to pursue an education in a country explicitly founded on the belief that we are endowed by our Creator w…
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…fter passing through a military checkpoint. Christians and Muslims are not welcome. As an occupying power, Israel is required by international law to preserve the status quo and to act for the benefit of the local civilian population. But Israel claimed security reasons for its Jewish-only access. “These are Muslim holy sites,” explained Sheikh Taysir Tamimi, head of the Palestinian Shari’a Islamic courts. Tamimi remembers praying in the Bilal Mos…
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…ionships, rather than particular acts.” It also urges faith communities to promote sex education, reproductive rights, and full inclusion of women and LGBT people in religious life and society at large. “We need to move religion away from saying homosexuality is wrong, or masturbation or abortion, or oral sex, or sex outside marriage,” Haffner explained in an interview with RD. “The point is, what is the quality of the relationship?” While recent…
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…very idea of finding a tent in the house was so foreign, and truthfully so welcome, that it could only come from a source that was Wholly Other. Irrespective of anything that might be regarded as proof, at least until my father announced plans for an upcoming camping trip, that novelty and unforeseen possibility had no other name for me than Santa. “Sorry, I didn’t really get to talking about God,” Hook told me when I went up to congratulate him a…
Read More…ting federal hate crimes laws comes too late from my friend’s son – but is welcome future protection for our community. Those on the religious right, however, have been sounding the alarms over the measure for months, claiming it will “silence” the Christians who want to preach against homosexuality as a “sin.” Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council called the legislation a “thought-crimes bill” that would give “special rights” to homosexuals…
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…zation took center stage, preparing the way for a modern period that would welcome both humanistic individualism and the eventual triumph of reason and science. The early modern world was astir with cultural renewal, technological innovation, and religious reformation. The printing press captured the oral tradition on the written page, and the printed word became a matter of depersonalized, static precision. Henceforth, all religious quarrels (bot…
Read More…cy, and replace it with shari’ah… it’s sedition.” (emphasis added on the treason charge). Benen writes, “The fact that Fischer is an unabashed bigot doesn’t seem to matter.” Welcome to the GOP’s Christian nation, to which God gave the First Amendment to protect Christians from satanic intruders….
Read More…with the children. It seems that no part of who she knows herself to be is welcome in this world, or for that matter by God, because, after all, the Bible is clear about the status of women. Right? I still remember when I first discovered that the text in Ephesians that tells wives to be submissive is immediately preceded by a command that Christians be subject to one another with no reference to gender at all Not only is this text explicit that t…
Read More…. My mother said, “I think it’s wrong, but I love you and you’ll always be welcome in my home.” She made good on those words, always treating my partners as members of the family—even if, at her heart, she believed I was outside God’s will for my life. (My journey to reconcile my sexuality and spirituality was a long process, but much of that journey can be found at my magazine Whosoever or my bookBulletproof Faith.) Many LGBT people don’t experie…
Read More…esota’s biggest Boy Scout group said Tuesday that gays and lesbians remain welcome in its troops, despite a national announcement that the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) will continue to bar leaders, employees and members who are “open or avowed homosexuals.” “We’re a reflection of the community,” said Kent York, spokesman for the Northern Star Council, which has 75,000 Scouts in Minnesota and western Wisconsin. “Our commitment has been to reach out…
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