Religion Dispatches
…Board of Rabbis issued a statement against the hospital policy. So did the New York Protestant Council. The Diocese of New York fought to keep the policy as it was. After a 4 month fight, the Board of Hospitals agreed to change the policy, meaning that birth control would be allowed in the public hospitals of New York City. There were many fights like that. But in this current controversy, only one religious voice is being heard despite the fact t…
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…cial statement on morality, reflects neither participation nor openness to new sources and new voices. The dissonance makes obvious that the power structure hasn’t changed a whit since Vatican II. The second, and to my lights the more egregious problem, is the complete absence of any pastoral sensitivity which ought to be the hallmark of every church teaching. A group of parents connected with the Malta-based, Catholic-rooted, pro-LGBT organizatio…
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…ontend, are not granted by either document, only recognized in them; these rights exist only because they were granted by God. That “endowed by the Creator” argument has been made repeatedly by Republican politicians in speeches lately, including Mike Huckabee, Michele Bachmann, and Newt Gingrich. That’s the new “values voters” rhetoric: government is a tyrant, disobedient to God. Sure, all the anti-gay, anti-abortion, and anti-secularism stuff i…
Read More…Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Moore tackles California’s new law protecting the rights of transgender students, allowing them to freely use bathrooms or locker rooms they feel fits their gender identity. Moore emphasizes that Jesus tells us we are born “male and female” and the existence of transgender people “who feel alienated from their identities as men or as women” is simply the result of the “fallen” nature of our world—sin…
Read More…life. Each day now, and not just on my birthday, I try to learn something new. If not some profound thing, then at least to see with new eyes even something already and always there: signs of life’s continual unfolding. A new bud opening on the tree, an apple fallen from the weight of its own ripeness, the wind blowing this way instead of that. That’s why I have endeavored to have some kind of new experience of great proportion on my cyclical bir…
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…prevalence of progressive-oriented Muslim community leaders may itself be news to many Americans. Cultural Imperialism, or Human Right? Most project participants agreed that conversations about LGBT issues within the Muslim community might better be pursued outside of mosques rather than within them. Those who did support direct religious engagement argued for starting with the notion of Allah as a God of mercy and compassion. LGBT Muslims, the r…
Read More…ics leaning against full marriage equality, the report still contains good news for gays and lesbians. An overwhelming majority of Catholics (69 percent) believe that sexual orientation is fixed and cannot be changed by “ex-gay” therapies. When asked if sexual activity between people of the same sex is sinful, 56 percent said no. That compares to 46 percent of the general population. Dr. Michele Dillon, professor and chair of Department of Sociolo…
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…but certainly it all has the potential to be at least good. Humans create new humans all the time. It’s how we nurture those new creations that matters. Here is where to spend our energy. I suppose you could argue, and it certainly has been argued, that ‘in the beginning’ God created everything as it is now, in which case when new things are created in this burgeoning field of Venter’s known as synthetic biology, you might be a bit miffed. But fa…
Read More…uld not matter to them if a presidential candidate was Mormon. Only 25% of Americans say they are less likely to support a Mormon for president. (By comparison, 61% of Americans say they are less likely to support an atheist, 33% a gay candidate, 24% a former marijuana user, 11% a Hispanic, 7% a woman, and 3% an African-American.) But Mormonism does not matter to 70% of Republicans overall and 72% of independents. Liberal democrats polled least li…
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…red, and Art declared its independence from Religion. This created a whole new way of seeing, a new and distinctively modern culture of display, and a subtly religious perspective where the line separating real bodies from visual imitations began to blur. We live in that world of hybrid forms still today. The body is a site of conflict as well as a source of uncanny cultural production. So the body parts of the paradigmatic “man of science” are…
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