Religion Dispatches
…Take Ataturk, father of an ostensibly Central Asian nation; he was born in today’s Macedonia, his features strikingly and suspiciously Slavic—blond hair and blue eyes. The 1990s war awakened many of these connections, and as Turkey in many respects challenges Ataturk’s legacy (especially his late 19th-century romantic European nationalism), the older truths of Turkey’s Ottoman heritage gain visibility. Not to resurrect empire, but to rediscover th…
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…Thomas Head (1990) and Sarah McNamer (2010) have shown. Like Catholic nuns today, medieval women married Jesus in wedding ceremonies, replete with rings and gowns. Indeed, these marriages were functionally on par with marriages between two humans. And things could get messy when human-divine marriage and human-human marriage overlapped, as I show in my essay in Queer Christianities (NYU, 2014). This means that, for hundreds of years, medieval Chri…
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…hostile mainstream and by necessity engendered by their western isolation. Today, that drive is motivated—as I’ve heard discussed among leading figures in Mormon Studies this week and as was hinted at in the Church’s own statement and a Deseret News editorial today—by the need to create an endowment capable of sustaining the global physical infrastructure of Mormonism (temples, churches, universities) even as the bulk of the Church’s population sh…
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…summary or arbitrary executions.” More from OutRight Action International: Today [November 18], the Third Committee of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has voted to maintain language on sexual orientation and, gender identity (SOGI) in resolution A/C.3/71/L.38, on ‘Extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions’. The resolution, which is introduced biennially in the Third Committee, urges States to protect the right to life of all people…
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…What I was saying was, what does it mean to us today? What it means to us today is about freedom. That’s what that was all about. It was about individual freedom, it was about economic freedom, it was about individual rights. This is, of course, the very “States’ Rights” rhetoric that sparked outrage in the first place. And the follow-up to every claim that the Civil War was about “individual rights” and “economic freedom” has to be followed up w…
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…pioned by portions of the far-right Jewish and Christian Zionist movements today. Hungary: Against “liberal hegemony” Like so many others, Balázs Orbán, political advisor to Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (no relation), as well as the current chairman of Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), Prime Minister Orbán’s crony factory, draws chuckles from the audience by framing NatCon in Brussels as a heroic resistance operation against…
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…nd possibilities. I thought about one of those histories and possibilities today. On October 11, 1973, then-Governor Art Link, a Democrat, gave one of the most important speeches in the state’s history. At the time, the state was undergoing a fossil fuel boom and inevitable energy development. Governor Link once stated that, “I have no intention of allowing North Dakota to become a sacrifice area in order to run television sets and air conditioner…
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…ut an end to the long 1990s when, as it is nearly inconceivable to imagine today, the biggest problem in our post-Communist, unipolar world seemed to be Monica Lewinsky. I had long planned to become a corporate lawyer. Two years later, I enrolled in law school only to leave within months. There were many reasons why, but among them was this: I could no longer go down the path I’d imagined, a quiet professional life in suburban America. This realiz…
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…d only truly became famous in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and is known today as one of the most influential Catholic theologians with regards to evolution in the second half of the 20thcentury. To chart this influence, one need only note Teilhard’s citations by the three most recent Popes. In 2003, Pope Saint John Paul II echoed Teilhard’s vision of a cosmic Eucharist in the encyclical Ecclesia Eucharista: Because even when it is celebrated on…
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…sident of the United States understands Christianity as a “get out of jail free” card used to freely exercise open bigotry, it can seem pretty conclusive that power has prevailed over justice. But consider some other words of Daniel Berrigan’s: “Redeem the times! The times are inexpressibly evil. Christians pay conscious, indeed religious tribute, to Caesar and Mars . . . And yet, and yet, the times are inexhaustibly good, solaced by the courage a…
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