Religion Dispatches
…s, Three Shots at Ending or Limiting Abortion Rights Ballot initiatives in South Dakota, Colorado and California threaten to end or limit abortion rights. In South Dakota, anti-abortion activists have resuscitated a measure than failed to pass two years ago, by softening the language in the initiative, “includ[ing] language purporting to make exceptions for incest, rape or the life and health of the mother,” a recent New York Times editorial point…
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…There have been reports (still unverified) of clashes with Al-Qaeda in the south, a story about drone strike in Marib, just two hours to the east, is also emerging. But lunch is a very important time in Yemen. Three other reporters join us and we order rice, salta—a traditional Yemeni lamb dish—chicken, soup and piles of fresh bread. Because of Pesach, I don’t touch the bread. I’m eating my salta with a spoon instead of scooping it with a handful…
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…r Students Alliance and the Gender Studies Department of the University of South Alabama to talk about my new book. During my lecture I faced a standing room crowd of heretics, fence sitters, curiosity seekers, and true believers bracing for a circus sideshow. Traveling across America to speak on freethought and abolitionism during the 19th century, white feminist atheist Ernestine Rose was smeared as being a “thousand times below a prostitute.” C…
Read More…were introduced, and laws were enacted in seven states (Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Oklahoma and South Dakota). The new laws in Arkansas, Georgia and Minnesota require that women be told that a fetus may be able to feel pain (and that they be offered the option of having anesthesia administered directly to the fetus), even though there is no scientific evidence to support this statement; these provisions are similar to an exi…
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…Submission is about all of that. You were co-chief of the New York Times’ South Asia bureau. How did your work over there affect your view of New York, of how we remember September 11—and what’s happened since? A novelist is, in some sense, always an outsider—and being abroad, being a geographic outsider, was very helpful in seeing what had happened to America in the wake of 9/11. Not being immersed in the fear, the anxiety, that a lot of America…
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…tion and creating something new and amazingly vibrant on Washington Square South. But what may ultimately be most endearing was his gift for exploding the cheap piety we’re still imprisoned by as we head toward the 2012 elections. Nowhere was this on display more prominently than in his distinction as the first author to have the word “fuck” printed in the Village Voice. In “Toward a New Definition of Obscenity,” Moody, who had by 1965 screened ba…
Read More…with a selection of hardbound books on atheism. This week posters for the South Bank Atheism Society (SBAS) were removed from London South Bank University by student union authorities. Once again, the claim was not that atheists cannot express themselves, but that the posters did not to comply with the union’s standards. The posters featured a parody of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” in which God has been replaced with the Flying Spaghetti Mon…
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…ashed the work ethic and entrepreneurial spirits of citizens of the global South. But if we take Burton’s theological investigation of history and apply it to our faithful neighbors, we arrive at a much less paternalistic conclusion. “God will provide,” may seem like an empty, refrigerator-magnet platitude to the non-devout but it is a theological truth to adherents of the Prosperity Gospel in Nigeria. When a majority of Muslims worldwide believe…
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…in New York and Philadelphia—not to mention affiliates across the Midwest, South, West Indies, and even South Africa. Israelite ideas were popular in the Holiness movement, and played an indispensable role in the evolution of Pentecosalism, the most numerous Christian movement of the twentieth century. I could find important antecedents in the Anglo-Israelite, who had representatives both here and in Britiain, and even make a cameo in E.P. Thompso…
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…row, as US policy evolved to support the country’s division into Sudan and South Sudan in 2010. But the law plays virtually no role in US policy toward Saudi Arabia, given that, for 15 years, the president has waived sanctions on the basis of US national security interests.) More recently, people generally mean that the US should engage “religious actors,” particularly groups on the ground in the Global South. Sometimes these groups are doing huma…
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