Religion Dispatches
…Amen, Mark Hyman and Mehmet Oz—to get the plan going in his church back in January. Instead of congratulating the shrinking Warren on his recent thirty pound loss—Marsha West takes Warren to task for losing weight with a New Ager, a Jew, and a Muslim. Dr. Amen, who says he is a Christian, is criticized for his devotion to “New Age” practices of meditation techniques and Reiki. Dr. Hyman is skewered for being Jewish and for recommending Yoga—which…
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…id cases were rising again after a March dip and, though down from its mid-January high, the virus was raging. Those of us who hadn’t politicized a lethal pandemic were eagerly getting vaccinated. California had thousands of daily Covid cases and a hundred or so deaths a day and had implemented a responsive rule meant to maximize freedom and limit transmission by adjusting measures according to infection rates. Depending on infection rates, one of…
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…eft]. Many people carried this image during nation-wide Women’s Marches in January 2017 to protest the 45th president’s inauguration. The poster inspired praise (for including a modest Muslim woman as a symbol of American patriotism) and criticism (for implying Muslims need to support American militarism and imperialism to be “truly” American). Not all Muslim women feel liberated by the image Cox is referencing; as Muslim fashion blogger Hoda Kate…
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…ime until 2008, and Ireland had criminal blasphemy laws on its books until January of 2020. No earthly penalties for blasphemy or apostasy are specified in the Qur’an. Under shariah, blasphemy is often conflated with apostasy, which is a crime in traditional fiqh (as it was under Christian medieval laws), but only when it’s accompanied by insurrection or war against the Muslim community. Neither blasphemy nor apostasy was meant to be a punishable…
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…dominance in space with a ceremony at the Washington National Cathedral on January 12th, 2020. At an event that conflated Christian supremacism with American exceptionalism, the first Chief of Space Operations was sworn in on a King James Bible donated by the controversial conservative-run Museum of the Bible. Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, the dean of the cathedral, said that the Bible would accompany Americans to space. The Military Religious…
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…l significant prochoice minorities among Mormons and White evangelicals. A number of leading mainline Protestant denominations are officially prochoice, including The Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. As is most of organized Judaism. There are also deeply considered prochoice theological traditions within all of major world religious traditions present in t…
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…s book met widespread opposition among evangelicals. “We’ll never know the number of LGBTQ Christian 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:…
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…about forever, of a very large share of the Black people living here, now numbering 42 million. As Malcolm X pointed out decades ago, it’s impossible to regard the United States as a nation of laws when those laws are very often suspended in the case of Black people. Malcolm believed, correctly, that a nation choosing to be only conditionally lawful cannot really be regarded as lawful at all—and should certainly stop its boasting about equal just…
Read More…he has another chance. The American Independent noticed that the bishops’ January 29 amicus brief on the Prop. 8 case cites Regnerus to support this statement: “A mother and father each bring something unique and irreplaceable to child-rearing that the other cannot.” The footnote in the brief (page 8) contains exactly the kind of distortion that anti-marriage-equality advocates have been making since the study came out. It characterizes the Regne…
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…faith has something to answer for in that it could bear such fruit in such numbers. That some evangelicals now wish to separate themselves from what their faith tradition has devolved into is well and good, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves about the ways that same tradition fostered the very problems to which critics now object. Second, properly speaking the problem isn’t heresy, it’s idolatry. Heresy has to do with ideas contrary to the received tr…
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