Religion Dispatches
…d organizations which see homosexual behavior as immoral. There is debate but it is between the mental health establishment and a much smaller number of traditionally minded religious therapists. However, even if Spiegel had correctly identified the nature and participants in the debate, she still would not have gotten it quite right. To his credit, Schumacher-Matos does a better job when he reviews material given to him by Spiegel and her editor…
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…ident who mutes or undermines every single message his own administration puts out. For another thing, this is a very abnormal time in what has been a very abnormal three years. The craving for some kind of ordinary life is readily apparent across all kinds of social boundaries. However unfortunate their methods, people will fight to maintain homeostasis. My own family went out for dinner on Friday night, and were pleased to do so knowing that in…
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…p, students from another school of the deaf in Verona, Italy are speaking out about their abuse. Alessandro Vantini described the sodomy he experienced as so brutal and relentless that he felt “as if I were dead.” A description like that cannot be filed under gossip. It is also not petty gossip when not one but two governmental commissions in Ireland, The Murphy and Ryan Reports, lay out in stark, horrendous detail the abuse of children at the han…
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…ince we are commanded by God in the Holy Scriptures to take it … [and] to put them all to the knife.” Not to be outdone, the Puritans regularly invoked the Canaanite conquest as they entered their “Promised Land.” In his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), Cotton Mather imagined the Puritans as cosplaying a divinely inspired genocide by describing Native Americans as “Ammonites” and “Indian Amalekites.” In his racial taxonomy, drawing on the Curse…
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…ant of at the time. Through the AVA, I began to find more contacts throughout the country and throughout the world. As it turns out, there are many groups of people who consider themselves to be ontologically different from normal humans. There are people who identify with angels, fairies, wolves, etc. By the end of my research I became convinced that this is a sizable community worthy of serious study. What’s the most important take-home message…
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…ideas of heaven: Heaven as a real place, heaven as an idea of something beautiful and perfect but unattainable, heaven as a location somewhere, heaven as a process, heaven as a galvanizing or corrupting influence or an incentive for good (what the Bible calls “righteous”) behavior. As I dug deeper, I began to see that people have been asking the same questions about heaven since they started to talk about it. While they’re unanswerable, they’re al…
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…ay” (who, like King David, models repentance and rehabilitation) or the “truth-teller quoted out of context” (who, like Christ, will triumph in the end.) Meanwhile, beyond an NCR subculture, sensational images of Robertson as a fringe figure—an extreme loose cannon—underplay continuities between him and relatively more moderate conservatives, making allies with roughly similar ideas seem like lesser evils. So I wondered whether to acknowledge Robe…
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…Bonaparte. On an August evening in 1791, either before or during the revolution (depending on when you date the revolution’s beginning), slaves performed a voodoo rite, Robertson’s “pact with the devil.” That the dominant tradition existing alongside Voodoo is Catholicism implicitly buttresses Robertson’s case. As for the actual events, however: though slave revolts occurred often throughout the colonies in both Americas, the one that liberated H…
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…ed to do was address some of that prejudice, the misinformation that gets put out there. You can talk about and think about Muslims as you want, but you can’t stop Muslims from building a mosque. You can hate Muslims from the comfort of your house, or publicly, but when that becomes stopping Muslims from building a mosque, or worshipping, then we are crossing the line into something else. How do you feel Hollywood deals with diversity—is it gettin…
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…e Vietnam War. Think about torture under the Bush administration. Think about complaints raised about American crimes in Afghanistan, including drone attacks, the specific subject of her question! It was none other than Martin Luther King Jr. who called America, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Of course, he was also called an anti-American domestic enemy for doing so. I saw many people laugh at Hamas’s complaint about being…
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