Religion Dispatches
…ceptions, are constructed and maintained outside of Christian communities. Most often, when Christians develop an argument of limited approval of condom use, those arguments generally advocate accommodation: “We Christians will agree that condoms should be used so that the spread of HIV might be slowed.” In these arguments, the rhetoric does not imply that condoms are things that Christians ourselves might use but are things that Christians could…
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…y brown, Muslim, American terrorists. But don’t you find your role in this most recent ad from Lowe’s truly objectionable? Here you are destroying the world’s natural resources to drive around town, and turn on an obscene number of lights. Doesn’t this offend your morality? Or do you truly have no shame? PC: Riz gets to play all kinds of roles. I just play fat Indian guys. In fact, for my part in the Lowe’s ad, I was given food to eat between take…
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…al or moral concerns about pornography, public policy ought to rely on the most reputable evidence possible. What’s more, Utah’s declaration fails to address the high rates of porn use among the conservative and religious, despite the state being something of a poster child for the phenomenon. What follows is an excerpt from my book, The Pornography Industry: What Everyone Needs to Know, which presents reliable information about a variety of contr…
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…were the “new” and “chaotic” inflationary scenarios in the 1980s, and the most recent has been the “landscape” of string theory, which emerged in the early 2000s. Since then, a host of rival multiverse scenarios have emerged, as well. In each case, the proponents have been ridiculed and dismissed, but with diminishing levels of rancor with each passing decade. What we’re witnessing right now is a reconfigured repetition of a 2500-year debate over…
Read More…ess, very few are well-funded. Blogging and online websites exist only, in most cases, at the mercy of advertising revenues. So while the number of voices has increased, the number of well-funded reporters has decreased. It’s reassuring to think that as print news takes a hit, online media will be there to fill the gap, but the story isn’t quite that simple. Content is certainly being generated, but it’s proving no easy replacement for print. Many…
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…inspired terrorism in these United States. I am ready to step up, and I am most eager to hear what you think. Hartford Seminary notes that it isn’t all that easy to numerate all of the Christian congregations in the U.S., but they nevertheless put the number at roughly 338,000. I am willing to work with this number until a better one comes along. Of this number, roughly 8,000 congregations claim upwards of 1,000 members; most are smaller, indeed m…
Read More…ngest growth over the last decade has been among Latino populations, and almo*]}*st 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. With a bill modeled on Arizona’s SB 1070 under construction and headed for th…
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…re intertwined with direct and personal promises to soothe the deepest and most intimate wellsprings of vulnerability, suffering and insecurity felt by their followers in the audience. Sitting in those pews, I realized in a new way that millions of people across the US have been thoroughly conditioned to believe that ‘saving America’ (in essence, through instituting an exclusionary theocracy) and saving their own soul are one and the same. In an e…
Read More…ber of Deputies approves, the draft code will go before the Rwandan Senate most likely in early 2010. It’s not like this is shocking news on the continent where 38 of Africa’s 53 nations outlaw homosexuality, including Kenya where a homosexual act can land you in prison for up to 14 years. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg: Nigeria has a similar bill (to the Ugandan legislation) waiting to reach its statute books and already allows the death…
Read More…at the staff failed to report it; and indeed, her words were posted as a testimonial on a Planned Parenthood-affiliated website (only to be taken down later, when some pro-life activists drew the conclusion that someone at Planned Parenthood must have knowingly let the rape go unreported). This is supposed to be a sinister, telling, part of the growing mountain of evidence. Finally, then there are some incidents that do seem like they might be ins…
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