Religion Dispatches
…hundreds worshiped until recently are attended by less than a dozen. Historic Christian communities are becoming history. 4.) TOP TEN ONION RELIGION STORIES: “Jewish Elders Lift Ham Ban.” For instance. 5.) TOP TEN ABUSES OF RELIGION DURING THE ELECTION SEASON The Interfaith Alliance critiqued what it called the Unholy Use of Religion in the Presidential Campaign with this list of the worst abuses of the primary season. Among them: Hillary Clinton…
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…he Home, which drew contributions from Kassian, Hunt, and other complementarian matriarchs, such as Dorothy Kelley Patterson, who with her husband, Paige Patterson, created the homemaking degree and curriculum introduced at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2007 and P. Bunny Wilson, author of anti-feminist Christian books such as Liberated Through Submission. In her introduction to the collection, DeMoss wrote of her culture-transformin…
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…to understand the concept of redemption? Of the five definitions in the American Heritage Dictionary, three are economically related: the paying of an obligation (government bond); the recovery of something pawned or mortgaged; the “deliverance upon payment of ransom.” The final definition is “salvation from sin through Christ’s sacrifice.” In modern-day America, redemption has become a cultural construct as well as a spiritual state. Who confers…
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…tion that an artificial hip signaled an irreversible loss of physical integrity. During those years, I wasn’t just frustrated that I couldn’t control the constant hurt, I was also mildly embarrassed. When people asked why I was limping, I experienced a subtle yet detectable wave of shame—as if, somehow, my “defective” body signaled a kind of moral failure. Shameful Bodies: Religion and the Culture of Physical Improvement Michelle Mary Lelwica Bloo…
Read More…reland — it confirmed the change. We can no longer be regarded as the authoritarian state we once might have been perceived to be. This marks the true separation of church and state.” After the vote results were announced last Saturday, the Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin said that the Catholic Church “needs to have a reality check across the board.” A New York Times story by Danny Hakimmay reviews the power once wielded by the Catholic hiera…
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…sexual expression—consistently miss the big theme within the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. That theme is deliverance from bondage and God’s call to build just community, to resist Egyptian ways of oppression and sweated labor. As many have pointed out, the Bible has far more to say about economic justice than any other subject, to the point that right worship of God is directly equated with dealing justly with one’s fellow humans (witness the…
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…le from its ranks and fights against their rights, ignores the diminishing number of priests and the effects of this shortage on Church communities, and calls on Catholics to form the “perfect society” resembling the ecclesiology of Opus Dei. It is no surprise that Pope Benedict comes from a country—Germany—where the percentage of Church members attending Sunday mass is one of the lowest in the world. Strict adherence to orthodoxy will not be popu…
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…rights advocates have successfully changed population-control programs to prioritize women’s rights over demographic quotas enforced through abusive or coercive measures (as documented at length in RD contributing editor Michelle Goldberg’s forthcoming book, The Means of Reproduction), fertility control certainly bears the cross of a history that includes abuse and coercion of women of color and poor women. Indeed, it still does, though the most r…
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…torical letter several years previous that threatened to undercut the historical origins of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Things escalated the next day, October 16, when a third bomb detonated in the car of Mark Hofmann, the documents dealer who had found and facilitated the letter’s sale, confirming the murders had more to do with Mormonism than money. Hofmann survived with critical injuries from the explosion, only to later be…
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…et on its efforts to make the advancement of LGBT rights a foreign policy priority, and Human Rights First hosted an event featuring several members of Congress and released a new report on advancing LGBT equality in Jamaica. As we have reported, American religious conservatives have stoked homophobia in Jamaica and rallied resistance to efforts to decriminalize homosexuality. The Human Rights First report takes note of the damaging role played by…
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