Religion Dispatches
…n’t seem to realize that the kinds of same-sex relations that are going on today are not like same-sex relations at other times in human history. There were always people of the same sex having sexual relations, but today there are new claims. It’s like our proposals for more equality in marriage over and against the patriarchal marriage of the past. Same-sex couples are making claims as families and asking for thing like marriage. Same-sex Muslim…
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…hat’s a projection, and it’s based on the analysis of trends that are seen today. My suspicion is that they are underestimating the importance of this new transparency. It takes twenty years to grow a Baptist, and twenty minutes to lose one. And I think that people may be in for some real surprises in those areas. After all, it’s only been a decade or two that this has been an issue for Muslim children. Are they going to let their children have ce…
Read More…50, about one in five Americans will be foreign born, up from one in eight today. … Hispanics also have historic ties to the Democrats, if not as strong as blacks’ ties. But they are as strong or stronger in their support for active government, the safety net, and generous government service provisions. And the issue of immigration looms large, with Democrats viewed overwhelmingly as the most favorable party to immigrants. In the same Gallup analy…
Read More…itted same-sex couples to prepare to complete marriage license paperwork. “Today justice won out,” said Samuel M. Chu, Executive Director of California Faith for Equality. “Today’s decision by US District Court Judge Vaughn Walker to overturn Prop 8 and lift the stay on same gender marriages in the state of California on August 18th is a giant step toward equality. “The Supreme Court has affirmed that marriage is a fundamental right. Justice Walke…
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…of things. And when I was about to turn 40, I became interested in health promotion and disease prevention from a personal standpoint. As I read recommendations regarding health promotion and good healthy forms of living, it occurred to me that we were in fact reinventing the wheel. All these recommendations and so forth seem to be reiterations of how people were living before agriculture. And then it occurred to me that our genetics have changed…
Read More…rket. But it does seem that the two opposing traditions have come together today to act as a powerful rhetoric of gratitude as indebtedness. Today we have a thriving self-help industry that churns out a steady stream of books on pop psychology, happiness, and gratitude. How well do these grapple with the issues you’ve raised? I was a little surprised by how little attention is paid to the history of gratitude in the self-help literature. I see my…
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…nationalism dates back to the pilgrims, my series examines how features of today’s God-and-country ideology owe a particular debt to the obsessions that transfixed the popular culture of Britain in the 1890s: the supposed “hordes” of immigrants diluting the nation’s racial stock; melancholy over the putative “weakness” of a once-great nation; panic over non-straight public expressions of sexuality; a sci-fi tinged apocalypticism, in which heroes a…
Read More…more dangerous: A monied and sophisticated indifference to reality. Islam today, science tomorrow. (No, wait; make that misrepresenting Islam and science today.) We must keep in mind the effect this will have on our constitutional rights and freedoms. Those who want to target the rituals and practices of a misunderstood religious community can very easily expand their target to other populations. We’ve come too far as a country, in terms of t…
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…important, however, that we consider religious and nonreligious experience today in light of an emerging philosophical and practical in-between pointed to by the growth in the number of those who self-identify as religiously unaffiliated. Take the 36-year-old nonprofit director from Chicago who describes herself as “something like an atheist… most days.” She insists that being an unbeliever has no bearing on her almost daily prayer practice: Do I…
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…in a whole series of laws, many of which we pay absolutely no attention to today. Such as? There’s a law that says you can’t wear blends of cotton and linen, or wool and linen. Nobody rails against people wearing blends today. There were very specific reasons for those laws that no longer make sense. In order to understand the reasoning behind “no man shall lie with another man” we have to take into account the fact that at that time they didn’t u…
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