Religion Dispatches
…or healing for parishioners, but realized his position perhaps was not the best one from which he could provide solace or healing given this particular situation. So he asked me and another colleague to intervene. It was a tough but rewarding experience, one I carry with me whenever I speak or write on this issue. So understand, when I criticize the church and its authorities harshly, it is because I feel the pain of those who suffered abuse, and…
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…gious people, but that it was the fault of Christians who haven’t done the best job of “acting like Jesus.” So, he says, he “wanted to apologize for that.” Rios’ church is a Seventh Day Adventist congregation. Like the institutional Catholic church where Landeza ministers, Adventism has remained stridently opposed to same-sex marriage and has often made life difficult for LGBTQ members of the denomination. However, as with the many individual Cath…
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…t need Brooks to feed me this. And, although I’ve suggested that Brooks is promoting a kind of “reformed” humanism, he also makes it clear in Animal that he’s really just advancing the British stream of Enlightenment humanism (advanced by thinkers like Adam Smith and Edmund Burke) which celebrated the power of sentiments and affects, rather than the French (promoted by figures like Descartes and Voltaire), which advanced the work of reason and rat…
Read More…those young people will experience. The booklet has been designated as a “Best Practice” resource for suicide prevention—the only one of its kind for LDS people—by the Suicide Prevention Resource Center and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. I spoke with Dr. Caitlin Ryan of the Family Acceptance Project at SFSU about the research and the reasoning behind this groundbreaking resource. I noticed that in the booklet you characterize hom…
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…but I will say, that religion rooted in basic human equality is one of the best bridges for “constructive engagement.” In her “Lessons from the Last Fight,” Sarah Schulman evokes the powerful resistance culture represented by ACT UP and the Lesbian Avengers in the struggle for the compassionate treatment of people suffering with HIV and AIDS. She reminds us that this culture thrived from an ethic of “mutual recognition”: respect for what other act…
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…he American Political Science Association’s 2020 Ralph J. Bunche Award for best scholarly work exploring ethnic and cultural pluralism, and co-winner of the award for best book on race and ethnic politics. Myisha Cherry: Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, Myisha is also the Director of the Emotion and Society Lab. Her research is primarily concerned with the role of emotions and attitudes in public life….
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…ment. Women are presented as victims, unable to make choices about what is best when deciding to be sexual and when they are pregnant. In the truly progressive faith community, we hold that women have a right as moral agents to decide what is best when they face unintended pregnancy, and we believe that women are not by and large victims—they are the authors of their lives. Given the history of religious oppression, a movement that speaks or advoc…
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…n the most obnoxious and ridiculous views must be tolerated. Bad ideas are best conquered with good ideas rather than with repression. Yet, the anti-civil liberties orientation of Christian politicians and pundits appears to be shared by several prominent atheists like Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens. For them and their followers, as for Trump and Cruz, radical Islam is best countered through jailing imams, preventing incendiary preac…
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…fear that technology might one day surpass us, the human form isn’t always best for the job. Take, for example, the synth telephone operator. Why create a physical robot for this job which has to receive audio through a wired earpiece and then respond via speaker into a microphone? Couldn’t synth software do the trick without complex parts that mimic the functions of ears and a mouth? Furthermore, wouldn’t it make better economic sense to distribu…
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…le, because the deceiver is so powerful that any contact risks corruption. Best to avoid it entirely, lest you end up like Bill Nye, the Science Guy, who changed his mind on GMOs after visiting Monsanto. Under most circumstances, the reasonable explanation would be that Nye was persuaded by argument and evidence. But for those who believe in Monsatan, the better—the only—explanation is that Nye was coerced, just as the best explanation for my skep…
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