Religion Dispatches
…llective everything.” In the Tea Party era, ‘collective’ is a four-letter word. Beck and Barton don’t even like the terms “human rights” or “social justice” because they see them as collectivist. In a televised conversation in April, Barton dismissed social justice, saying “That’s collective rights. Jesus was not into collective rights. He didn’t die for world in large. He died for every single individual.” Beck is spending so much time on collect…
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…icion of child abuse must report their suspicion to the authorities, says Ford. However, Ford admits that sexual abuse is a delicate issue and she is under no illusions that victims of all faiths often approach religious leaders for moral and spiritual guidance before going to the authorities. “This is a type of crime in which people reflect on what the ramifications are to the victim and to their family,” she said. “But when we are faced with the…
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…o “blasphemous content.” The IHEU reports being contacted by an increasing number of secularist groups organizing on Facebook, including groups in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Sudan. In all of this, the United States is an anomaly since it rejects even laws against religious hate speech, which were found in 36 of 45 European states in 2011. It’s the best place in the wo…
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…a “person” under the law—is not a new question. In the 18th century, the Lord Chancellor of England famously scoffed at the claim, asking, “Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned and no body to be kicked?” In the Affordable Care Act cases, some courts have avoided the difficult issue of whether a business has religious conscience rights by instead concluding that the business is so closely identif…
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…lly from Bible-toting white men who’ve manipulated scriptural teachings in order to keep Black people in both literal and proverbial chains, will be as fake as it is antagonistic. The acknowledgment that Black lives matter must be more than a moment in history, not a marketing ploy or an opportunity for fraudulent inclusivity via corporate statements. Keep that. The dismantling of white supremacy has to extend far beyond “Blackout Tuesday” or it w…
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…ates Us All for their early twenty-first century release. It was a time of ordinary gods fighting ordinary devils. This was true at least of mainline denominations and white evangelicals. Though they were not without their own conflicts, black churches were largely spared the generational ruptures that cast Christian-raised white Americans into the “None” category. Because rap never divested from its origins in the prophetic witness of the black c…
Read More…one to measure the pontiff’s influence” than, say, actual metrics like the number of people going to mass or returning to the church. According to Burke, you just have to “ask around” Boston to find folks who know someone who’s thinking about returning to the church or who feels less horrible about the church than in the darkest days of the U.S. clerical sex abuse scandal, which had Boston at its epicenter. That’s a pretty low bar, but of course n…
Read More…have dismissed the film as blatantly false. But what I’m hearing from a number of Mormons deeply familiar with the Proposition 8 campaign is that the film gets it mostly right. [See also Holly Welker’s review here. – Eds] Some take exception to editing choices that sequence events out of context for dramatic effect; others wish that the filmmakers had not been so cartoonish in their depictions of anti-gay-marriage standpoints, using only notori…
Read More…big tent approach to coverage of American ir/a/religion. But do the Gallup numbers point to new ways we might be thinking about business as usual? Two findings are striking. First: Gallup reported that although Americans felt religion’s influence was declining, many—75 percent—agreed that more religion would be positive for the country. Not surprisingly, churchgoers were most gung-ho about religion’s beneficial impact. But “over half of those who…
Read More…d Jewish Funds for Justice, the latter of which had already swallowed up a number of smaller Jewish social justice organizations. I know several people who work at BtA, and I commend them on their ability to keep a secret. I and friends of mine plied several of these folks with drinks, but their lips stayed sealed. (I did find out that the org would have an action-verb in it, as is the fashion these days, but that’s all.) That being said, I’m not…
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