Search Results for:

VIPREG2024 best promo code for 1xbet Jordan

Shhh…Don’t Speak of Abortion: Roe v. Wade at Thirty-Six

…lity, the moral reality of women’s lives is that sometimes abortion is the best moral choice. Fowler, who has been a longtime leader in the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and has served on the board of Planned Parenthood adds that, “what is missing from this document is any acknowledgment of women’s moral agency and their capacity to make honorable sacred decisions for the welfare of their families and for themselves.” ”What is missin…

Read More

Too Hot for Shul: Rabbis Seek Healthy Israel Dialogue After Gaza

…these conversations,” said Stutman, “and I still think synagogues are the best place for them.” Co-sponsored by J Street, the school’s J Street U chapter, and the New Israel Fund, the event was titled “Test of the Crisis in Gaza: Who We Are and What’s Next?,” an acknowledgement of the unprecedented polarization of American Jews produced by this summer’s war in Gaza. Stutman is, along with over 840 other rabbis and cantors, a member of the Rabbini…

Read More

“Ex-Gay” Common Ground More of a Killing Ground

…point is that people can leave whatever it is that God calls less than His best and move into something that is His best, becoming more like He is. Honestly, this isn’t news. So-called “ex-gay ministries” have long given up the promise of turning homosexuals into heterosexuals. True, some who say they’ve “left homosexuality” have married opposite gender partners and had children. Here we can begin the long argument over Alfred Kinsey and his conti…

Read More

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

…nvented in 1991 by a pair of marketing consultants, whose methods were, at best, sketchy. The persistence of these categories shouldn’t surprise anyone. Generalizations are appealing. They make good copy for journalists. “Polls that produced generalizations about the national population,” Wuthnow writes, “spoke to the nation’s historical awareness of itself as a distinct people.” In the case of religion, they made it possible to imagine some kind…

Read More

Evangelical “Sexual Purity” Is Not About Sex—It’s About Power

…aders? Sexual purity movements, past and present, are not ultimately about promoting a biblical view of sexuality. They are about explaining large-scale culture crises (e.g. Anglo-Saxon decline, the Cold War, changing gender roles and sexual mores) and providing a formula for overcoming those crises. Today’s movement is laden with a therapeutic rhetoric that presents these choices as the best choices for those who seek to conform their behaviors t…

Read More

The Meaning of Make Believe (Why Religion Doesn’t Have to Be “Real”)

…ver I went—in my backpack to school, biking through my neighborhood. At my best friend’s house, we marched around his yard and the woods behind his house pretending we were preachers prophesying the end of the world. It gave me a thrilling sense of power to possess this secret knowledge that everyone else was too blind to see. Whether as a prop in playacting or simply toted around my pre-adolescent life, having the white inscrutable Bible close at…

Read More

RDBook: Power Belongs to God

…merican political fundamentalism. Sharlet, who has since become one of the best journalists covering American religion today (and a columnist for Religion Dispatches), got a remarkable scoop some years back. An acquaintance invited him into Ivanwald, the community in Arlington, Virginia, that exposed him to a network of which few outsiders are aware. He calls it “The Family,” though it goes by several names; some incorporated, others not. Beginnin…

Read More

Gay Mormons Tie the Knot

…yman, about a gay Mormon missionary in Italy, was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2011, and my latest, Marginal Mormons, just received a starred review from Kirkus.) I also marched with the Mormons for Marriage Equality contingent this year in Seattle’s Gay Pride parade, amazed to see compassionate Mormons with signs proclaiming “Sorry we’re late!” I belong to Affirmation, an organization for LGBTQ Mormons. I still have my triple combination on a…

Read More

A Long History of Blaming the Jews

…lly to a logic that treated the relative ‘Jewishness’ of a teaching as the best test of its truth or falsity.” Marcion, Tertullian, Justin, Origen and Jerome differed on crucial Christological and scriptural questions; still most identified any hint of carnality as “Jewish” and accused their opponents of “Judaizing.” Augustine took the trope even further, arguing in Against Faustus that the Jews were the living exemplar of falsity, “proof to belie…

Read More

Raising Children the Right Way

…bad behavior, but an opportunity to express love. According to Dobson, the best chance to communicate comes after an episode where the parent has physically hurt the child: For this reason, parents should not dread or shrink back from confrontations with their children. These occasions should be anticipated as important events, because they provide the opportunity to convey verbal and nonverbal messages to the boy or girl that cannot be expressed…

Read More