Religion Dispatches
…n’t seem to realize that the kinds of same-sex relations that are going on today are not like same-sex relations at other times in human history. There were always people of the same sex having sexual relations, but today there are new claims. It’s like our proposals for more equality in marriage over and against the patriarchal marriage of the past. Same-sex couples are making claims as families and asking for thing like marriage. Same-sex Muslim…
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…a Friend to his Country.” The motion passed. Now, when we hear that story today, it’s often used to suggest that people who oppose elected officials abusing government power to impose their religion on others are the “bigots” that Sam Adams disclaimed. That ignores the fact that this was still a British colony with an established church and that the U.S. Constitution wouldn’t invent the separation of church and state for another 15 years or so. B…
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…tian lives saved by this groundbreaking book,” comments Christian Feminism Today on its website. An earlier book, Women, Men, and the Bible, attracted widespread attention in 1977, giving hope to women raised in conservative denominations that required women’s submission to men. Mollenkott spoke at two of the first conferences of evangelical feminists: one in 1973 at Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver and another in 1975 to the newly founded E…
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…r now ending — a response much too fixated on the epiphenomenon, as though today’s naked expressions of white nationalism can somehow be separated from the longer career of white supremacy. Making a show of their ethical colors, liberal faith leaders have organized and participated in routinized rituals of personal purification that do absolutely nothing to make the slightest dent in structural oppression. Not all, of course: to say that would be…
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…industrial complex for their well-being, my children will not. Few parents today have seen pertussis or measles firsthand. As Eula Biss points out, it’s easier to oppose vaccines when you have no real concept of the diseases they’re intended to prevent. Similarly, few of us probably have much of a concept of what happens when, say, Neal Beagley refuses treatment for a bladder obstruction. The answer—that backed-up urine ruptures the kidneys and en…
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…story of the women’s movement and feminism to illuminate American troubles today, to recall the longer battle lines drawn amongst women’s organizations on opposing religious and political lines. This absence of feminist thought and contributions is equally evident in debate between science and religion on spiritual experiences, or the neuropsychology of religious experience. Rarely, in these discussions, does one find feminist studies of science o…
Read More…ts back to one that many speakers, including Reed and Gingrich, emphasized today: that not only did God ordain a limited role for government, God, and not the government, is the source of individual rights. “God gives you sovereignty,” said Gingrich, and “the government doesn’t define rights.” In other words, if the government tells you to buy insurance under the individual mandate, it’s not only infringing on your God-given rights, but exceeding…
Read More…other laws – especially regarding harassment – outside abortion clinics.” Today’s decision is limited to the 2007 Massachusetts law, and may not invalidate every buffer zone law currently on the books or that could be enacted in the future. The ruling leaves in place a 2000 decision upholding a Colorado law that imposed a 100 foot buffer zone outside all health care facilities, barring people from coming within eight feet of visitors to counsel t…
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…Apostle and Prophet Ezra Taft Benson, who continues to be read and re-read today. A tireless anti-Communist crusader and admirer of the John Birch Society, Benson’s packaging of the message parallels Skousen’s right down to the racial affronts (he claimed that the civil rights movement was a “tool of Communist deception”). And while the Church could distance itself from Skousen, it could not (and still cannot) from Benson. Moreover, Benson’s jerem…
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…marriage in Homosexuality in Islam. And, of course this is a big issue in today’s news. I admit I sometimes find the marriage equality movement—and the movement for inclusion in the military—paradoxical. On the one hand, of course I want the full rights of citizenship and I am lucky enough to be living in New York! On the other hand, I think of these as two very conservative institutions that got critiqued in serious ways by progressives in my li…
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