Religion Dispatches
…tzy visual stuff.” A few minutes later Justin has to choke back a laugh of his own during another animated sequence. But Father Shea doesn’t to notice. The video ends, he says a few words about the sacraments, and clicks play on the next one….
Read More…faith dialogue is hard. (Really, it is!). I’ll admit that when I watch the video, I get the sense that you’re not so much lecturing the Jewish scholars as performing for people who may watch the video later. You’re letting them know that John Kasich reads the Bible, and not only that—he can swap stories about the Hebrew Scriptures with real-live Hebrews. If that’s the case, then you’re basically using a group of Jews as a campaign prop. But that’s…
Read More
…l mission and blow up the bad guy in a kamikaze attack. Viral social-media videos thrust the Baton Rouge and St. Paul images into the consciousness of millions. In quick succession, the raw, unedited smartphone videos gave America something Hollywood has never shown us: a man’s actual death by gunshot. It wasn’t epic. It wasn’t honorable. It was simply horrifying. Far more shocking than even the exploding fake-blood packets of a Quentin Tarantino…
Read More
…m Khomeini International University. Sunni teaching holds that someone’s “true gender” cannot be altered, Kariminia told BuzzFeed News, but Ayatollah Khomeini’s understanding of Shiite teaching is that surgery reveals their “true gender” that may be hidden within. In fact, Khomeini had ruled that sex reassignment was allowed by religious law two decades before Molkara showed up on his doorstep. He wrote about the issue in 1965, just after he was s…
Read More…Till’s mother’s decision to show photos of her son’s battered body to the world ignited the actual civil rights movement. Last year, House Republican crusader Chris Smith suggested creating a new protected class entitled to equal protection of the law: immaturity. And at a presidential candidate forum in South Carolina a few months ago, Manhattan Declaration author Robert George stunned even the GOP hopefuls with his question about whether, as pr…
Read More…agery to affirm and elevate a leader who had admittedly broken the sacred trust between pastor and congregant.” Very true. Eddie Long’s continued pandering to keep the remnants of his deluded flock intact has no bounds. In fact, Long is King of his Lithonia Campus, subject to no authority. There is no church hierarchy to sit him down, no one to tell him that he is theologically incorrect. I hope that the full story of what he did to the young men…
Read More…l impossibilities and blows to dignity the driving ban means for the daily lives of women in Saudi Arabia. Watching it, I saw many similarities to feminist organizing I have seen in Mormon communities. The video is a model of how feminists working within conservative religious cultures begin to create space for ourselves. Even if Al-Sharif elects to take a low profile role in the Women2Drive movement, other women are taking the keys and getting i…
Read More…e right to marry the person that they love.” The 29-year-old Ms. Bush, who lives in Manhattan, ends the video by asking others in the state to “join us.” Over at Focus on the Family’s Citizen Link, blogger Jenny Tyree isn’t surprised at Ms. Bush and Ms. McCain’s support for marriage equality. “It’s rather easy for 20-somethings—or millennials—to jump on the very tidy-looking ‘rights’ bandwagon that proponents of same-sex marriage have made marriag…
Read More…urday for “violating public order” after making and distributing a YouTube video of herself driving her own car. The video was filmed last Thursday by Saudi feminist activist Wajeha al-Huwaider in the city of Khobar. Manal Al-Sharif’s brother, Muhammed Al-Sharif, was also in the car. After Al-Sharif’s arrest, the video was deleted by authorities, along with Facebook and Twitter accounts created by Al-Sharif to support a broader grassroots campaign…
Read More…(especially among younger voters) about joblessness and the future of the American economy. Poised against the background of a misty football field at the University of New Hampshire, Mitt continued to act like a front-runner, focusing on the economy while leaving burn-ups over homosexuality, abortion, and other hot-button “values voter” issues to Gingrich, Bachmann, and others who’ve been casting lots for the loyalties of evangelicals in Iowa. R…
Read More