Religion Dispatches
…009. And again here in May 2010. I picked up a copy of Milbank’s Tears of a Clown to check his sources. And there are none. No footnotes. Only a thank you to his research assistant Emily who “spent hours combing the Web and transcribing Beck oddities and ironies.” Ah, such are the wages of day-to-day-in-the-trenches religion reporting. Hey, Dana, next time, how about you hook a sister up with a footnote, or a hotlink?…
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…often generated more heat than light on talk radio and television, on the Web or in print, revealing a population that has a long way to go in dealing with the messy realities of pluralism. Yet it also provides an opportunity for reflection on more appropriate forms of religious disputation. When the highest religious ideals and the right order of the world is the subject of conflict, how do you treat those with different views? Americans have le…
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…gical Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, even wondered in an article on his Web site why there was “no one to step between (Rutgers student) Tyler Clementi and that bridge.” The death of Clementi and five other kids, who were either gay or perceived as such, would be a wonderful opportunity for Mohler to show some real compassion, or perhaps even cop to Christianity’s culpability in their deaths; but he makes no such effort as he writes about the s…
Read More…orado Springs-based Christian search engine that only returns results from Web sites that are consistent with the Bible. He says SeekFind is designed “to promote what we believe to be biblical truth” and excludes sites that don’t meet that standard. Houdmann says a search on his site would not turn up pornography. If you search “gay marriage,” you would get results that argue against gay marriage. And if you type in “Democratic Party,” your first…
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…g his personal struggle to accept himself as gay and talking about the despair and horror of lying awake at night wondering who had made him—he couldn’t be God’s creation, he reasoned, because God wouldn’t have made him gay. I think of Carol Lynn Pearson’s book, No More Goodbyes, and I think of the cost in terms of suicides, abandonment, loss, and regret. The cost in human suffering of such a blithe marginalization of some of the most vulnerable a…
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…younger people in Mormon-dominated Utah than elsewhere in the country. The website Utah Marriage provides these statistics for the year 2000: *Utah’s marriage rate is 10.6 per 1,000 populations, well above that of the United States, which stands at 8.7 *Median age at first marriage in Utah—Groom: 23 Bride: 21 *Median age at first marriage in United States—Groom: 26.8 Bride: 25.1 Marriages contracted so early face significant challenges, so it is g…
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…ard (congregation) hosted a community meeting featuring GLBT people from a number of faith traditions sharing their testimonies of faith and stories of their marriages as a form of “spiritual practice.” [For more on Mormons and marriage see From Here to Eternity: Of Mormons and Celestial Marriage.] What this series of events demonstrates is that the apology from Elder Jensen was, in fact, the product of a context of honesty and fellowship created…
Read More…oposed textbooks were biased in favor of evolution. (Reality is just so unfair!) Kopplin led a campaign to lobby the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to side with sound science. Due in large part to his efforts, board members, by an 8-2 vote, agreed to proceed with the purchase of biology textbooks. The (Baton Rouge) Advocate published an editorial in December, praising Kopplin’s work. The newest giant-killer in state education policy?…
Read More…how the accused shooter did not watch political news, but did admire a “a web-based documentary called Zeitgeist, that focused on currency based economics that ‘poured gasoline on his fire . . . The Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact on Jared Loughner’s mindset,’” according to Osler. Last year, the New York Times ran a piece on “Z-Day, the educational forum associated with the online movie ‘Zeitgeist,’” produced by Peter Joseph. The Z-Da…
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…cent days. Painful because he is clearly a man out of control, caught in a web of illness and unchecked ego; painful because he’s both a victim and co-conspirator of his own exploitation at the hands of self-serving voyeurs masquerading as serious journalists; and painful because the countless ways he is hurting himself and those he loves—and those who love him—are not unfamiliar to me. When you have someone in your life who struggles with addicti…
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