Religion Dispatches
…ck and roll with attendant mutations and variations, can be traced back to Africa and African American cultural forms and inspirations is an interesting question to pursue. God, on the other hand, is not in the linguistic, ritual, or imaginative mix that propelled and animated the music from the middle of the twentieth century to the present for most actors in this story. Instead, the music itself is the sacred anchor at the bottom of all this fus…
Read More…f liberal perspectives when it comes to social order, caring for the poor, promoting social justice, and living Gospel values. The teaching challenged many capitalistic hegemonies and called people to pay attention to those who suffer most. Against this backdrop, Catholics get the fact that LGBT folks face social injustice in a society based on hetero-normative structures, so it should come as no shock that they’d respond with compassion and a str…
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…nd every bishop in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Kingdom and South Africa has received the offer of a download. Each member of the Council of Cardinals, its secretary, and Pope Francis has received a copy, along with the original Italian-languages essays. If the hierarchy will consider what history really says, perhaps they will think about whether they need to restore the tradition of women as deacons in their own dioceses. Even so,…
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…ment agencies also provide large amounts of money for Catholic projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. There have been sporadic attempts to cut off such funds for various reasons and anger at the church over the sex abuse crisis is likely to strengthen those arguments. Atheist and secular groups are far more likely to lead those campaigns than progressive Catholics. Liberal members of the European Parliament just called on the president of th…
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…ing faces to the world. As one blog put it: “US HIV Money to Evangelicals, Africa’s Homophobes, Not MSMs.” While “progressive” movements within many religions and interfaith organizations work for us, others work for hate. Harris requires us to ask whether the progressive forms of religion, and responses to HIV/AIDS in religious forms, mask other responses, rendering them less apparent by making them seem exceptional. So, with regard to this new e…
Read More…o identify individuals at risk for becoming ‘extremists’; in reality, they promote the notion that dissent leads inexorably to violence while dividing targeted communities against themselves. Nicole Nguyen and the #StopCVE movement in Chicago have made compelling arguments that these projects contribute to the marginalization and alienation of the very communities they’re meant to engage. And yet, even as counter-extremism initiatives have come un…
Read More…ave historical and cultural links respectively, as well as West Africa and South Asia. These aren’t just ordinary organizations, either. There are TV stations, in several languages, private schools, journals and magazines, dialogue projects, and literary festivals. I met young Albanians and Macedonians studying Islamic sciences, between themselves fluent in Albanian, Turkish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and English; they’re in Istanbul for gene…
Read More…e behind all this there are ideologies. In Europe, America, Latin America, Africa, and in some countries of Asia, there are genuine forms of ideological colonization taking place. And one of these – I will call it clearly by its name – is [the ideology of] “gender”. Today children – children! – are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex. Why are they teaching this? Because the books are provided by the persons and institutions th…
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…remains heavily European) contains cardinals from the Americas, Asia, and Africa, including Sean Patrick O’Malley, a Franciscan who has been credited with cleaning up the Archdiocese of Boston, which witnessed some of the most egregious cases of sexual abuse and cover up under Cardinal Bernard Law. Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras and head of Caritas International, will serve as the panel’s coordinator. Among the…
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…e growth in world Muslim populations will increase not only in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but also in North America. Their demographic study validates your prediction that there will be more religious switching within Western culture from Christianity to non-affiliation. But the percentage of unaffiliated believers will actually go down as a percentage of the global population. But of course that’s a projection, and it’s based on the…
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