Religion Dispatches
…message from local leaders read. As initial reactions continue to arrive, today is a thoughtful day for Mormon people. With the support of the U.S. Supreme Court, LGBT families and their allies now take a great step beyond the prejudices of history and the hurt of the Proposition 8 campaign. But for Mormon families and congregations, however, the damage from Proposition 8 remains, and will remain—largely unaddressed and unremediated. Who has fu…
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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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…all elicited a powerful response, with the hashtag trending last night and today and getting the attention of clergy. The church we’d been attending didn’t bother mentioning #Charlottesville on Sunday. As if I needed more reason to not return. #EmptyThePews — Gov. Pappy 🕷 (@GovPappy) August 17, 2017 The trauma of the church accepting his sexual immorality was worse than my sexual assault. I’m in mourning. #emptythepews — Ms Cat. (@catherinemom23)…
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…nt power that its existence would be absolutely assured. Most Israeli Jews today, haunted by the same fear of powerlessness, still cannot believe in that assurance. People who are so preoccupied with their security—constantly on the alert for attackers, always fearing they might be “pushed into the sea,” feeling that their country is and must remain a psychological fortress—can hardly live a really normal life. Therefore, when judged by its own st…
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…less the government is actively requiring citizens to do something, courts today tend to be sympathetic toward public expressions of religion. “If he sues, he won’t have standing,” said Ledewitz. “Not on the constitutional claim.” In its statement, NASA explained that it had received the letter from the FFRF and was “thoroughly reviewing the grant awarded to CTI. Until that review is complete, NASA will refrain from responding to FFRF’s claims.” A…
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…through Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause. Hope is what led me here today—with a father from Kenya; a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. It is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have the courage to remake the world as it should be. All of which s…
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…ggie Gallagher—who also worked with the National Fatherhood Initiative—“to promote marriage”; and “gave money to writer Mike McManus to support marriage promotion, while also giving money to McManus’ organization, Marriage Savers (‘a ministry that equips … local congregations to prepare for lifelong marriages …’).” Horn was, coincidentally, a founding board member of Marriage Savers. In addition to the NFI grants, in 2006 the organization received…
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…means that truth, insofar as any human can grasp it, is inherently fluid. Today’s fixed set of demands may easily seem like tomorrow’s folly. Gandhi’s program was especially vague in the earliest years of his work, in South Africa. To demand a detailed list of specifics from today’s Occupiers would be like making the same demand of Gandhi in the 1890s. Yet Gandhi must have known intuitively, even then, an essential truth he would later articulate…
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…hosting a bunch of them for dinner at the White House. If Paul were active today, what message do you think he would want to send to this group? In the prologue to the new video series I imagine Paul writing a letter called To the Americans and written in the same blunt style he used to address so many communities across the eastern Roman Empire. It’s worth speculating about what he might say. He might, for example, ask us about our Pledge of Alle…
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…story of the women’s movement and feminism to illuminate American troubles today, to recall the longer battle lines drawn amongst women’s organizations on opposing religious and political lines. This absence of feminist thought and contributions is equally evident in debate between science and religion on spiritual experiences, or the neuropsychology of religious experience. Rarely, in these discussions, does one find feminist studies of science o…
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