Religion Dispatches
…fraught at the same time. I should know. After all, I wrote a book about African-American women, and found that many of the women I studied in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) historically either had outlived their husbands, been divorced, or were too busy doing church work to be tied down to a husband. Having a husband meant that they could not give their ultimate all for the number one man on most African-American womens’ lips, and it’s not D…
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…t, but still problematic for a religious order whose most famous member decries materialist greed on a regular basis. At Jesuit run Seattle University, adjuncts voted to form a union in 2014, but according to the Seattle Times, “ballots were locked up” while the university appealed to the NLRB on religious freedom grounds. According to Seattle University professor Emily Lieb, in April of 2015, “some 20 faculty, students, and allies were arrested i…
Read More…a speaking tour in Western Africa. (Raelians have been making missionary trips to Africa since 1982.) Three years after French urologist Pierre Foldés invented a procedure in 2004 to repair the damage of female circumcision Clitoraid was founded for the purpose of making the procedure available to women throughout Africa. Boisselier, formerly of Clonaid, became the organization’s president. While Dr. Foldés has publically distanced himself from C…
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…ame-sex unions. There is even an evangelical Christian ministry dedicated primarily to LGBT people, the Metropolitan Community Church, founded in 1968 by Reverend Troy Perry. (Perry, originally a Pentecostal minister, was defrocked for his homosexuality.) Nevertheless, the public debate over LGBT rights and same-sex marriage has overwhelmingly pitted religious values against civil equality. This ignores the reality that equality is also a moral—an…
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…the attendees from six of the world’s seven continents broke from the historic gathering to return to their respective nations renewed in their stand for marriage,” he says. “The courts may declare otherwise, and Hollywood may depict its demise, but the union of a man and a woman as the natural and enduring definition of marriage will endure until the end.” While in Ireland, stridently anti-gay Cardinal Raymond Burke refused to comment on his rece…
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…nd Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World has sexual violence at its center, primarily as it impacts women’s lives. And my day-to-day work at Union has included, among other things, empowering women’s voices in interfaith work, which has been so dominated by men. Elaine Howard Ecklund: At the beginning of my career, I did not much feel that my gender was that influential. I am at a different period now, having gone through some life course transition…
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…ess than any other the African has ever known.” The same kind of moral superiority of white slaveholders and moral deficiency of slaves was articulated in a 1978 publication by Rousas John Rushdoony, a prominent representative of the new “Christian scholarship” popular among contemporary white evangelicals. He writes: “Granted that some Negroes were mistreated as slaves, the fact still remains that nowhere in all history or in the world today has…
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…mmunication deteriorates and distrust grows. For those who grow up in authoritarian or fundamentalist Christian families, the difficult questions can’t be answered by checking a box on a survey, which is likely why RD contributor Chrissy Stroop and journalist Lauren O’Neal decided to compile an anthology of essays by exvangelicals, former Catholics, and others who have moved out of institutional Christianity and into the liminal spaces where Nones…
Read More…ace on moldy teachings. A majority expect him to okay birth control and married priests sometime soon.” He writes: Is it true that this silly majority of Catholics “expect” the pope to allow married priests and the use of artificial contraception “sometime soon”? Nope. Pew Research asked Catholics whether they expected the church to allow birth control and married priests, and just over half said they did—by the year 2050. Soon is, of course, a su…
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…hed the modern Inquisition in 1542; it was designed to deal with persons, primarily those who evidenced what was deemed to be a willful adherence to ideas contradicted by Catholic Orthodoxy. This language is instructive, because faith was understood to be partly an act of will in the Early Modern period. Thus, Protestant kinds of free thinking amounted, in the Church’s view, to a distorted kind of willing, not just an error in thoughts or beliefs….
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