Religion Dispatches
…further why even when so few Muslims do resort to violent actions, a good number of their co-religionists are reluctant to entirely dismiss them. Indeed, many more Muslims protested peacefully against “The Innocence of Muslims” than did violently, even though their numbers together were still incredibly small. In his introduction to Sufism for Non-Sufis?, University of Southern California Professor Sherman Jackson notes that we cannot separate Is…
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…al state with the historical and anthropological state of Muslims. Then it loses the point altogether. So I stay away from that designation and the sometimes arrogance that it causes. The point seems to be for some converts to claim they are returning to their origins, and that origin is Islam in the primordial sense. It is a very convincing discourse, but only by Western Muslims. Muslims born and in generations of Islam anthropologically don’t re…
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…cent poll gives us a starting point. It reveals that among those who have close friends or family members that are gay, 48 percent support marriage equality. Among the younger respondents who have close relationships with gays and lesbians, 64 percent support same-sex marriage. The new frame I propose is a relational frame, one that doesn’t talk of rights as much as it talks of relationship and responsibility for one another. With this frame as th…
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In recent years, a rather animated conversation has been taking place about the apostle Paul. This conversation has largely been between those who identify with what is commonly known as “the New Perspective on Paul,” and those who wish to defend a more traditional understanding of the apostle. I can’t say for sure which side is winning the debate, but some of us who were initially inspired by the New Perspective on Paul have decided that it has…
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…ys Mark was the first Internet age megachurch celebrity pastor and leading number one podcasts, number one sermon downloads, those kinds of things. So what that did is, elevated Mark to the stratosphere so quickly, whereas you might think…typically they may take 20-30 years of faithful ministry, but the Internet just propelled things with such rapidity, and the Internet only sees how you speak, that’s all the Internet is, it’s all about verbal art…
Read More…en though opposition to same-sex marriage seems to be cooling its heels at number three, it’s presence is still felt in just about all aspects of the “value voters” belief system. With abortion remaining at the number one spot, it’s clear that all things sexual continue to occupy the minds of those who seem the most opposed to anyone actually having sex. It’s interesting to view the “value voter” summit in juxtaposition with a new survey conducted…
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…te boundary. Before secular government enthusiasts get too excited by this number I would point out that, for a fair number of evangelicals, the worry is that the state will interfere with the church, not the other way around. Similarly, a little more than one in four White evangelicals said the federal government should declare Christianity the official religion of the United States. Far more (61%) said that Christianity should not be the officia…
Read More…ll the same. The clinic nurse I was shadowing that day attributed the high number, at least in part, to truck drivers sitting in their cabs in the gravel lot down the road waiting to clear customs. If we extrapolate that number out to the village as a whole and assume that over one-third of the women in this small town in rural Zambia are HIV-positive, the enormity of the HIV pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa becomes clearer. What intricate, invisibl…
Read More…—income factors that may have made low-cost clinics more appealing, or the number of abortion clinics in the U.S. and how that has changed over the time period in question, or the possibility that people in private practice would rather not perform abortions for any number of possible reasons, including threats on their lives—you’d be left unsatisfied. Likewise, the report expresses grave concern over the fact that the very same clinics that see…
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…st, 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 va…
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