find cheap airline tickets anywhere 3/31 – 4/7 phone number 1-800-299-7264 | Search Results | Religion Dispatches

LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…t as savior is at the core of Mormon worship. Every Sunday, we take a bread-and-water sacrament in remembrance of Christ. Baptism by immersion in the name of Jesus Christ is the gateway ordinance for membership in the Church. Yet when I have asserted the Christianity of Mormon belief for national audiences, the number one reaction has come from Christians who seek to correct my understanding of my faith and remind me that Mormons are not, in their…

Neuroscience Says Evil is “Over”: Not So Fast…

By Paul Wallace

…elling something, something like atheism or creationism or some other extra-scientific bill of goods. The real question is twofold: “What do scientists say, when they are handed a microphone and placed on a lighted stage in the public square? And how does that compare with what one might find in the scientific journals?” This question may be more difficult than the first, but it’s more urgent. Because it often happens that scientists, like so many…

New Study Touts Success of “Praying Away the Gay”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…get, the further removed you get from real life. We followed more of a real-life model than a hyper-controlled experimental model. We think the results challenge the reigning mindset that change is impossible or is extraordinarily rare.” Really, why try some proven methodology when one that gives you more of the results you want will do? The APA is so picky. None of these qualifications, however, will stop the religious right from totally blowing…

The New Age Fantasy of a Celtic Church that Revered Nature and the Divine Feminine Never Existed — So What?

By Ed Simon

…aghast at how the term is today most often associated with druidical quasi-pagans or fans of Enya. Twentieth-century novelist James Joyce, a critic of colonialism and nationalism who would no doubt be despised by someone like Buchanan, also alluded to the need for a separate, muscular Celtic Christianity as distinct from the conservative Irish Catholic Church, describing his native land in Ulysses as being “the servant of two masters… [the] imper…

“Pregnancy is Not a Disease”: Birth of an Anti-Contraception Rallying Cry

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…its MUST be accounted for! When Worlds Collide Ultimately, I think, the not-a-disease notion of pregnancy is a lot like the Watchmen/My Little Pony mashup in the sense that it depends upon radically different discourses colliding into each other in counterintuitive ways. Specifically, we have: Classical Christian notions of nature, borrowed from Greek philosophy. Briefly, the idea is that something’s nature—what the thing really is, in the most fu…

Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

By Jeremy Biles

…gift to the people of Chicago” (Picasso refused payment), the ambiguous, 50-foot-tall, 162-ton sculpture met with a combination of public affection and outrage upon its unveiling. Mayor Richard J. Daley offered these words on the occasion: “We dedicate this celebrated work this morning with the belief that what is strange to us today will be familiar tomorrow.” Tomorrow has come, and the Chicago Picasso is indeed familiar—but no less strange than…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…the false impression of scientific and therapeutic equivalence between pro- and anti-conversion therapy camps. That impression was created in part because the story ignored the freighted history of sexual reorientation practices in American life. The debates over this practice emerged in the early 1970s, a time when ineffective and dangerous psychiatric interventions into homosexuality were standard mental health practice and harmed many gay peop…

Change v. Change at NPR

By Warren Throckmorton

…icle by Mimi Swartz and published in the New York Times Magazine about same-sex attracted religious people who accept being same-sex attracted but do not identify as gay. I was quoted extensively in that piece and one of my former clients was interviewed for it. Here is what Schumacher-Matos surmises: In 2009, a task force of the American Psychological Association came out clearly against trying to convert someone’s sexuality because of its harm a…

From Licking Floors to Praying for an Inept Government, Churches React to C-19

By Daniel Schultz

…will come through all our troubles in hope.” Other Christians seem less pro-social, let us say. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, a Tampa Bay televangelist, equated changing habits in an effort to “flatten the course” with weakness, declaring that his congregation wouldn’t adjust their behavior in worship because they weren’t “pansies.” https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1239267305730736130 Others are willing to go some lengths to show they just…

The Year of the Abusive Priest

By Anthea Butler

…with 300 being incidences of pedophilia, and 600 priests defrocked in a ten-year period. These cases, according to Monsignor Charles J. Scicluna, represented sexual abuse cases that had occurred over the last fifty years. Unfortunately, this is a very small percentage of the cases worldwide, in part because Scicluna states that between 1975 and 1985, “I do not believe that any cases of pedophilia committed by priests were brought to the attention…