Religion Dispatches
…mpassion, as it has shown through its recently-launched mormonsandgays.org website. If LDS people can acknowledge that there are indeed LGBT people within our communities and if the gay Mormon youth in our families and congregations will be coming out of the closet at younger ages, as is now common, why should those young men and their families not enjoy the good experiences Scouting brings? If there is a place for gay young people in LDS congreg…
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…an-washing—that is evident when one compares screen grabs of the company’s website only a few weeks ago with its current incarnation. It’s obvious why this troubles us on a practical, human level—it suggests that the apparently newfound commitment to officiating only cross-sex Christian marriages is really just a convenient mask for homophobia, and that the Knapps only discovered their newfound devotion when gay marriage became the law of their la…
Read More…with. Klein also traces online resistance sites like No Shame Movement, a website on which people share stories about breaking up with purity culture, and #LifeAfterIKDG, which tracks critiques of the hallmark purity how-to text, I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris. Harris himself suggests he’s rethinking his message, and will do so in a film with an anticipated release date in the fall. As Pure demonstrates, the interconnected messages abou…
Read More…mic Shariah Law”; the American Freedom Law Center, which, according to its website, “aggressively seeks to advance and defend our Nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage”; and ACT for America. The term “sharia law” is itself a misnomer, as sharia is not a codified system of laws but, as Amina Wadud wrote for RD back in 2011: [Shari’ah] is really a lot like the Tao, or like Zen. It is the way, but not in a road-map-with-specific-details kind of way. It i…
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…ligion. For example, the Mecca clock got the attention of the conservative website Jihad Watch, which connected the calls for Mecca Time to an “Islamic Supremacist agenda”: “Amid the absurdity, the common thread with other manifestations of the Islamic supremacist agenda, is that they’ll say anything to get what they want. And all too many will go in for it, hook, line, and sinker.” Even a blog post for Foreign Policy was titled, “Mecca’s Plan to…
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…ords election campaign in 2007, and that Giffords subscribed to Loughner’s website since October 25, 2010, suggests that the two may have been in contact more recently. As this case unfolds, you certainly need to know these facts.” Will this half-baked conspiracy theory about a Giffords-Loughner connection (which appears to be promoted in an effort to dispel any notion that Loughner was in any way influenced by right-wing rhetoric or ideology), an…
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…he Labor Day weekend, Lee released a statement through the Auburn Seminary website, announcing his departure and affirming his love for the congregation, even as he claimed the church’s reaction was “deeply hurtful” to him. It might also come as a surprise that Lee pastored a United Church of Christ congregation, a denomination with a reputation for being a bastion of liberalism. Yet, not only does the UCC have a sizable proportion of conservative…
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…t as big a deal as dropping the “Jewish.” That move comes with a sleek new website redesign, and a shifting of emphasis toward an “online-first” reporting strategy. But actually, the Forward has long stood out among the Jewish media landscape for actually being progressive, in that it does not prescribe ideology but actually reports stories. As Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall wrote last year about former Forward editor turned columnist J….
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…wn to man – a clay tablet.” Send them a text or tweet, and they promise to phonetically translate it into Old Persian, stamp it into a clay tablet, and send it to you in the mail. At first glance, this seems like yet another pop-up website to join the ranks of Mail A Spud and Send Your Enemies Glitter— a cute service designed to make easy profit. Yet Dumb Cuneiform seems somehow different. The profit margins can’t be high on hand-stamped cuneiform…
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…istian decipher what he or she should believe? A post at the Fountains UMC website adds detail: the series will focus on questions such as “Why does it matter that the Bible is reliable?”, “Why does it matter that Jesus was born of a virgin?”, “Why does it matter that Jesus was resurrected?”, or “Why does it matter that Jesus is the only way?” At first glance, the series looks like a simple re-hash of the fundamentalist agenda, but it may be respo…
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