Religion Dispatches
…as some critics and scholars do, is just ridiculous. It’s narrow-minded at best, intellectually dishonest at worst. And the approach, the evolutionary perspective, often meets with obstinate ideological resistance in the humanities. Some folks feel that culture has nothing to do with biology, that you can’t say anything interesting about literature or film from an evolutionary perspective, or that an evolutionary perspective by definition entails…
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…cert in Cairo has sparked a brutal anti-gay crackdown. As part of what can best be described as hysterical homophobia, more than 65 people, mostly gay men, have been arrested in the crackdown against L.G.B.T. Egyptians. At least 20 people have received prison sentences, ranging from six months to six years. Several men have been subjected to anal examinations, which human rights groups describe as a form of torture, ostensibly to determine whether…
Read More…vimento Brasil Livre say the exhibition promoted pedophilia, blasphemy and bestiality. Although the ruling and the museum closure were both bloodless, they represent a subtle erasure of LGBTQ rights to public space and participation. Jurema Werneck, director of Amnesty International in Brazil, said the country should do more to uphold its citizens’ constitutional rights. “These debates make explicit the vulnerable situation of the LGBT population,…
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…le’s boosters promise that the town has enough bed-and-breakfasts and cell phone towers to transform the eclipse into a comfortable tourist experience, there is a fundamental strangeness to the whole affair that no amount of merchandizing can fully defang. That it’s hard to reduce the weirdness of things like the eclipse hasn’t stopped Hopkinsville from trying. More than a half-century ago, on Monday, August 22, 1955, news media around the country…
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…force us to leave,” Robertson concluded. “I felt the full weight of their fear, and where there is such fear, we can be certain that there is no possibility of love. Phone calls and an email inquiry to representatives of the Southern Baptist Convention were not returned….
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…gence apps” including As One America, which contains the name, address and phone number of Christian neighbors “who are not showing up to vote or who are not registered.” He then showed a map with big red arrows pointing to precincts “within striking distance” from Vida Church to the precincts that are “where the devil’s got a stronghold that God wants to break up.” The app was developed by Superfeed Technologies, which has also designed apps for…
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…ionships between individuals, but is more easily disseminated to a greater number of people. We experience AI as a crisis because, like the rabbis of the Talmud, we actually have conflicting needs and desires. We crave the efficiency of AI because it can save time and effort, helping us write emails, make phone calls, and recall and summarize information. At the same time, we’re seeking human connection when we do reach out, and AI fails to provid…
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…encourage hate speech. 6:58 The man in front of me asks, ‘Do you have an iPhone charger?’ ‘For a 5,’ I ask, though so presumptively it does not merit a question mark. ‘Yeah.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Awesome.’ He’s a nice fellow, though he believes Palestinians would have a different view of Israel if only they ‘visited’ (not seeming to understand that they cannot, and many would not be visiting so much as returning to places they were expelled from). They could…
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…lso specifically Muslim institutions that seem to have made their way into European legal systems; most notably, a reviewing court known as the nazr al-mazalim, which the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II used as a model for a new (but very durable) system of administrative courts on the Continent. Other scholars have noted important similarities between Islamic endowments (awqaf; sing. waqfv) and the equitable trusts that first entered English law…
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…good thing. And we tend to assume, in our interfaith educations, that the best way to learn about another religion is to study its texts and its official positions. The Paris trial challenges both. Perhaps it’s best to encounter religions in the real world, informally, with a focus on actual actions, not official words. Pope Benedict XVI worked hard to improve the Church’s interfaith profile, with limited success. While his largely positive attit…
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