Religion Dispatches
…or Anne Gudenkauf. Among other things, Schumacher-Matos read an article by Mimi Swartz and published in the New York Times Magazine about same-sex attracted religious people who accept being same-sex attracted but do not identify as gay. I was quoted extensively in that piece and one of my former clients was interviewed for it. Here is what Schumacher-Matos surmises: In 2009, a task force of the American Psychological Association came out clearly…
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…e group Susan B. Anthony List, or Jim Daly, the new head of Focus on the Family, or Robert George mastermind of the Manhattan Declaration) legal scholar Melissa Rogers is most decidedly not a member of the Christian right. Rogers, who has worked for the pro-church-state-separation group the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, and now has an affiliation with the Brookings Institution, is one of the country’s best authorities on church-sta…
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…nd decline? On the other hand, what alternative forms, if any, of “church” might people be forming to replace the religious communities that they have left? 2. Increased LGBT Acceptance Within Evangelicalism Although issues related to LGBT identities have long been a part of Mainline Protestant denominations such that LGBT individuals are largely accepted as just another member of the church, evangelicals have taken a much more adversarial stance…
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…heir Promised Land . . . God had to move in mighty ways to remove their enemies. . . . Our Promised Land is Pennsylvania and we’re taking it back.” Which brings us back to Israel/Palestine. Netanyahu and American Christian nationalists not only invoke similar religious rhetoric in their desire to expand their “Promised Land,” but they also start with a parallel us vs. them religiously-coded binary that envisions Native Americans and Arab Muslims i…
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…infringes on that comfort. By the end of this study, I was shocked at the number of educated people I met who dismissed my work as a book on “freaks.” Ideally, I would like readers who dismiss this community to stop laughing, and readers who fear this community to perhaps smile. What alternative title would you give the book? So many books have been written about vampires that almost every clever title has been taken. Our Vampires, Ourselves was…
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…n Airlines flight 11 into the Twin Towers on 9/11, was inspired by this promise. But among progressives, the sex promised to the righteous in the Qur’an isn’t sex as we know it, but something mysterious and sublime for which sex is a poetic stand-in. Second, what happens to our bodies in heaven? This is my favorite part of the heaven conversation. For if you believe in heaven as a real place, a physical place (and most people do), then you need a…
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…er, I see no such alibi for looking the other way as Robertson made anti-Semitic smears (plus similar attacks on New Agers, feminists, Muslims, and others) and absurd claims about global politics. More than the 1988 campaign (or the subsequent partnership of his lieutenant in this campaign, Ralph Reed, in the criminal schemes of Jack Abramoff) this case dramatizes the moral bankruptcy of alliances between the NCR and neoconservative power brokers….
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…ral damage of our own inner struggles; occasions for testing, edifying, forming, and reforming ourselves? No, cultivating our own individual gardens, whether performed atheistically or theologically, is not a sufficient response to my mind. If the Lisbon earthquake has anything to tell us in the face of Haiti here and now, it would have less to do with edification through the contemplation of suffering and more to do with some very practical advic…
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…Mandvi took time out of a very busy schedule to talk about Halal in the Family and much more. Namely: He teases us with glimpses into his upcoming HBO show, The Brink; his time with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, and some valuable insights on the fine line between free speech and hate speech. I read your book, No Land’s Man, [Note: You should too. It’s wonderful.], and I’ve watched Halal in the Family. What’s sparked your interest in combating Is…
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…nization Truah tweeted last week, “It’s true that both US & Israel have committed war crimes. It’s neither antisemitic nor anti-American to say so (as patriots of both countries do). Her words do not equate the US/Israel w/Hamas/Taliban, which carry out terror attacks against civilians.” https://twitter.com/rabbijilljacobs/status/1402971552895930373 Moreover, Omar gets so much flak for not calling out Hamas and yet when she finally does, she gets…
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