Religion Dispatches
…ry’s nephews and nieces have served missions in Ireland, Italy, Argentina, Ethiopia, and Thailand. You can’t just leave Mormonism behind when you have that kind of connection. I’m a writer and find that most of my stories still deal with Mormons. (My book, The Abominable Gayman, about a gay Mormon missionary in Italy, was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2011, and my latest, Marginal Mormons, just received a starred review from Kirkus.) I also mar…
Read More
…verse in Psalms that talks about a great leader coming out of Abyssinia or Ethiopia. There was a sense in which Jesus’s return was the coming of a black liberator. White fundamentalists and evangelicals were very clear that they didn’t want anything to do with African Americans for most of the twentieth century. They didn’t see African Americans as able to contribute to their movement. The racial assumptions were built into who evangelicals and fu…
Read More
…s relying on a cultural trope in African-American religious history called Ethiopianism found throughout African-American Christianity, Black Judaism, Black Islam and Anglo-Caribbean religious traditions such as Rastafarianism, with the reference to the Biblical passage: “Princes shall come of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” (Psalms, 68:31). This verse was seen by some as a prophecy that Africa would experience a politic…
Read More…hops in the church. Not coming out, he says, amounts to “moral cowardice.” Ethiopia: Religious Activists Push for Harsher Anti-Gay Laws Addis Ababa municipal officials approved an anti-gay rally – billed as a protest “against foreign culture and homosexuality” – that will be held on April 26. The goal of the event’s organizers seems to be to generate support for strengthening the country’s anti-gay laws – which already have penalties of up to 15…
Read More…and famine currently occurring in eastern Africa. You see, countries like Ethiopia and Somalia have experienced a terrible drought this year that is threatening more than 14 million Africans. As the food prices have skyrocketed due to the famine, millions are in danger of starvation. Relief organizations are quickly working to bring in desperately-needed food and medical supplies. But unless relief is provided within the next couple of months, mi…
Read More
…ath, and a celebration of possibility in traditions from China to Egypt to Ethiopia. Bread is ritually important in a Judeo-Christian context, but not in Asian religious traditions; and its non-universality, writes Plate, makes bread like religion: “It has some basic ingredients…and serves certain purposes…but when we get down to the nitty-gritty of it, the similarities between traditions can be difficult to sniff out.” Telling the history of reli…
Read More
…were down to 15,000 fertile adults huddled in a corner of what we now call Ethiopia. Then, 10,000 years ago, the earth, which has an erratic orbit around the sun, took a happy turn: we entered the comparatively gentle Holocene Epoch. Agriculture started and fertility boomed. No problem at first. There was always land to move to as we over-reproduced. And so it was that the most dangerous species ever to evolve spread over the planet. As the good t…
Read More
…s to be manly in contemporary Quebec, and certainly different than ancient Ethiopia. Not to wade too much into contemporary debates, but gender construction, both in its perception and performance, is highly dependent on culture. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? I am a straight, white, Evangelical Protestant male, and I grew up among a lot of folks just like me. While I do not share a lot of political views with the people th…
Read More…Gog and Magog,” which he interpreted as Soviet Russia, would lead ”Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya,” and “Gomer and Togarmarh” (interpreted as Turkey and Eastern Europe) in war against Israel. “Russia will arm and equip a vast confederacy,” Lindsey wrote. “The territory of Northern Africa is becoming solidly pro-Soviet.” But according to Lindsey divine intervention would save Israel, defeat Gog and Magog, and then hasten the battle of Armageddon and t…
Read More
…boteau’s divine travelogue, a journey to locations from Israel to Jamaica, Ethiopia to Ghana, that have been configured as “Zion” for Black Americans. Along the way, Raboteau explicates everything from Afrocentric religions like Rastafarianism, to legacies of colonialism in Africa. If religion is anything, it’s a collective exercise in identity discovery and invention, and by thinking about “Zion” in all of its multitude, Raboteau is able to demon…
Read More