Religion Dispatches
…the farms dotting the landscape outside the village are empty and the harvest is still months away? What happens, then, in a village that has no economic infrastructure (but plenty of desperation) when a steady stream of truck drivers with a regular paycheck are parked in a gravel lot waiting for days to resume their route? An informal economy springs up. In Kazungula it yields makeshift stands offering any kind of goods its citizens can imagine s…
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…one another that just transcends the screen. Putting a label on it would just cheapen it. Plus Riz is such a huge sex symbol to the gay Muslim community that if it came out he actually has a brilliant and sexy wife, it would totally ruin our international sales in Iran and the Emirates. RM: We wanted to offend as many people in the commercial as we possibly could. A homosexual Muslim couple putting up Christmas lights after buying caulk from Lowe’…
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…ghest, whereas Vermont—known to be a liberal state—clocked in with the lowest number of both Internet porn searches and religiosity. Just knowing the number of conservatives in a given state was enough information for the researchers to accurately predict the extent of pornography searches using key words including sex, gay sex, porn, free porn, XXX, and gay porn. These findings held true even after the researchers controlled for other demographic…
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…pects of the world around us. The cosmic multiplicity proposed by the Atomists and Stoics became an intellectual target for St. Augustine centuries before Bruno’s fate was sealed. Yet the “multiverse” seems to be back in style, now wearing a scientist’s lab coat instead of a philosopher’s robes. What are we to make of this radical scientific theory, and where did it come from? Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s latest book takes up these questions and more, t…
Read More…and comments are the primary goals of a publication, there’s no end to the means that will get you there. The increase in commentary and opinion and the decrease in investigative and reported work can be seen throughout news media and is not limited to coverage of religion. As journalist Pamela Constable points out, only four U.S. papers still maintain a stable of foreign correspondents. This simple fact seems a bit jarring when juxtaposed with t…
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…ple at federal law enforcement’s disposal, and I think that this is a realistic number to get started. But I would also want to add another 2,000 CHC spotters in order to make the effort truly complete. Half of these 2,000 could be asked to spend at least 15 hours per day monitoring the kind of Internet traffic that seems to appeal to the so-called “lone wolf” shooters; the others could be assigned to track violent extremism among some 120 self-id…
Read More…ts living in the American West. As we’ve reported here at RD, the Church’s strongest growth over the last decade has been among Latino populations, and almost 4.5 million Mormons worldwide are Spanish-speaking. Economic downtimes and anti-immigrant outcry go hand-in-hand in American history. And even though Utah has a 7% unemployment rate significantly lower than the national average, anti-immigrant sentiment is running strong in the Beehive State…
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…Stitt is actually under criticism for his doctrinal evangelical anti-LGBT stances. Stitt uses his time at the Pray Vote Stand podium to double down on his anti-transgender, anti-public health, pro-oil, pro-parental rights, pro-school privatization, anti-CRT platform. While the audience loves him, Stitt is toeing a party line and Perkins is right there next to him, smiling. The panel on alternative media sources is a refreshing surprise—Libby Emmo…
Read More…ion criminalising them and threatening them with death. The scapegoating must stop.” For that scapegoating to stop, strong opposition must be raised by religious voices not just in America but around the world. We already know that we cannot count on the likes of Rick Warren or even Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams to be leading voices against the persecution of gays and lesbians in Africa or anywhere else in the world. Williams was quicke…
Read More…then billed Medicaid for what they paid for the pills as well as what it cost to store and dispense them. Suddenly Planned Parenthood’s billing seems a lot more reasonable, right? So reasonable, in fact, that Planned Parenthood of California wasn’t even asked to pay back the overcharge, and the state law was changed to… let Planned Parenthood bill Medicaid in exactly the way they’d been doing all along. And there’s an old story about a Planned Pa…
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