Religion Dispatches
…that gay marriage is a Satanic sacrament and that Satanic bodies are sacrosanct and cannot be subject to trans-vaginal probes. On June 30, The Supreme Court ruled that Hobby Lobby could invoke religious objections to avoid covering contraception in its employees’ health plans. This ruling encouraged the Satanic Temple to launch its “Right to Accurate Medical Information” campaign. The campaign took aim at state laws requiring women to review info…
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…hereas the characters in Hereafter live in upper-class Paris, middle-class San Francisco, and the most caring and engaged child welfare system the world has ever known. But the differences are more than skin-deep, especially when it comes to religion. Hereafter goes out of its way to demean traditional religion (and esoteric nonsense) en route to its reluctant affirmation of the afterlife—if the film were a person, she’d be “spiritual, not religio…
Read More…, drug-smuggling and “free-love,” guru Baghwan Shree Rajneesh gathered thousands of followers to a headquarters in rural Oregon. Conflict with the natives yielded criminal charges against Rajneesh’s henchmen for wiretapping, arson, attempted murder and salmonella bioterrorism resulting in 751 cases of acute gastroenteritis. Paul Erdman went on an acid trip, changed his name to Love Jesus and founded a patriarchal commune in Seattle’s Queen Anne ne…
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…the answers. Only the Lord does.” Joyce Thompson, who came to Houston from San Antonio with a friend, echoed a persistent theme to me over breakfast at our hotel: that Christianity is somehow under siege from enemies. Thompson, who described herself as a 66-year-old Tea Partier, tearfully said, “I can’t understand people who want to destroy our country.” When I asked her who those people might be, she replied, “It’s a Muslim thing. It’s Satan agai…
Read More…udying at the Gregorian University in Rome, Bishop Ruiz led the Diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas from 1959 to 2000. In the 1990s he served as mediator in an attempt to end the conflict between the Mexican government and the indigenous Zapatista National Liberation Army in Chiapas. Though he was asked to step down as mediator for supposedly favoring the Zapatistas, the tentative truce between the two groups has been sustained since 1998. He is…
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…nd to set a new kind of conversation in motion. When we met last month in San Francisco, I began our conversation by commenting on the scope of the book. Buruma, best known for his expertise on Japan, told me he’d written partly to contest the idea that religion doesn’t matter in the political life of East Asia. “It’s a different kind of religion,” he explained, “the idea of spiritual authority still plays a big role.” And, while it operates more…
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…-transgender bathroom policies as “harmful and deceptive gender ideology.” San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone joked last year that he was sure more transgender identities “will be invented as time goes on” and said the acceptance of “gender ideology” threatens not only the faith, but the very foundation of human society, predicting “a reversion to the paganism of old, but with unique, postmodern variations on its themes, such as the pra…
Read More…for gays and lesbians may have won the round at the ballot box, but in the San Francisco courtroom where the legal battle to overturn Prop. 8 wraps up its first week, religion has been largely absent. Religious arguments don’t hold a lot of legal water, so anti-marriage equality proponents are forced to use their secular arguments, and reading reports from the courtroom (since the U.S. Supreme Court nixed video coverage of the trial), they’re leak…
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…tand and implement sustainable and eco-conscious ways of living.” And, the San Francisco-based American Muslims Intent on Learning and Activism (AMILA) hosted a sold-out, green-themed Ramadan retreat this past September to help participants learn more about the connections between Islam and nature. In the UK, the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environment Sciences, established in the 1980s, is developing proactive and protective opinions on en…
Read MorePride celebrations continued this weekend, with major events in San Francisco, New York, and London, where two police officers were engaged, generating both support and religious denunciations. In New York, one of the grand marshals for the pride march was Subhi Nahas, a “gay Syrian refugee who’s faced threats from both ISIS and President Bashar al-Assad’s regime,” reports the New York Post. In America, a magazine published by Jesuits in the US,…
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