Religion Dispatches
…Our editorial aim is to create a new way of thinking about religion in American culture and politics, one that challenges last century’s media dominance by an ultra-conservative fringe, that invites free discussion of religious ideas once they’ve hit the public square—and that keeps us and our readership powerfully engaged. – The Eds PEOPLE Publisher: DIANE WINSTON Co-Editors-in-Chief: EVAN DERKACZ, LISA WEBSTER Managing Editor: ELLIE FAUSTINO Ed…
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…em. Latin America: Uruguay and Argentina top social inclusion index The Americas Society and the Council of the Americas released a report that calls Uruguay and Argentina the region’s most LGBT-friendly countries. Uruguay tops the Social Inclusion Index for the third year in a row. From the Washington Blade’s Michael Lavers: Gays and lesbians have been able to legally marry in Argentina and Uruguay since 2010 and 2013 respectively. Both countries…
Read MoreChristians United for Israel, the apocalyptic advocacy group founded by San Antonio televangelist John Hagee, has just announced a generous donor who offered to match donations of up to $500,000, to help it raise a million dollars by the end of the year. CUFI has always maintained — despite all evidence to the contrary — that it is primarily motivated by concern for Israel and the Jews, not by Hagee’s apocalyptic vision for the return of Jesus at…
Read More…5 year-old girls who were “spiritually married” to him. The trial, held in San Angelo, Texas, was short but disturbing, with audiotapes and photographs of Jeffs’ crimes presented to the jury. During the trial, Jeffs fired his defense team, and defended himself with rambling missives and an affidavit he claimed came from God. Often, he just sat in silence. The jury verdict came quickly after hearing particularly sordid testimony, including the test…
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…said a few massacres back, guns aren’t a spiritual problem, they’re a partisan problem. Oh, American tolerance for gun violence reflects a screwed-up value system, to be sure. It’s just not the one you think. It’s not an issue of forming consensus around the need to regulate the availability of high-powered weaponry. As I pointed out in 2015, overwhelming majorities of Americans are in favor of these restrictions. So it’s not that Americans don’t…
Read More…ry communists. There are also documents from Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in a context that seems to suggest we should return to the era in which “real Americans” dealt seriously with communists. Agenda asserts that “the Left” is “either ignorant or they’re evil.” “Liberal” Americans (and anyone who does not embrace their agenda is a liberal) are, in the film, literally called the enemies of America. The film claims tha…
Read More…, right? Maybe, but her research has been backed up by the likes of the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National Association of Social Workers, “who all confirm that LGBT parents make good parents,” Freedom to Marry reiterated. No study is ever perfect, and Gartrell acknowledges limitations in her study, including the fact that the families who participated are a nonrandom sample. Such limitations we…
Read More…atest step in Bell’s “search for a more forgiving faith,” a process Kelefa Sanneh detailed in The New Yorker last November. Bell first truly rocked the conservative Christian world in 2011 by questioning the existence of hell in his book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Six months after its publication, he resigned from Mars Hill. Although the reasons behind, and the consequences of, Bell’s departu…
Read More…onth jail term they could have received, for publishing a cartoon in a satirical magazine some saw as suggesting that President Tayyip Erdogan is gay. According to Pink News, “They published a cartoon in satirical magazine Penguen in which the President greets an official, who is making a hand gesture used to mock gay people in Turkey.” The case was brought against them after a reader complained the cartoon was against the country’s moral values….
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…that the history of the region: shows two things: first, that the North American presence in Central America has clearly been characterized by interference in the internal affairs of our countries and, second, that for over 80 years the concern for democracy has been totally subordinated to the interests of US security, when not to private North American financial interests. Today, the United States is El Salvador’s largest trading partner, and re…
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