Religion Dispatches
…s so ready to pounce when non-Western women are threatened. Indeed, as scholar Lila Abu-Lughod points out, even Americans who are not feminists—often on religious grounds—seem ready to fight wars in the Middle East, ostensibly in order to “save” oppressed Muslim women. Moreover, I tend to agree with Muslimah Pride that the freedom to strip is far from the pinnacle of women’s liberation. (I much prefer the freedoms to speak and write, to work, to v…
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…mingly Catholic country with a dominant Spanish influence. With a dizzying number of languages, economic classes, ethnicities and cultures represented in American Catholic churches, American Catholics resist singularity. And it follows that they are going to be inconsistent in how they define mercy, as the hierarchy of the American church is often wont to demonstrate. Even the variety of American “Mercy Doors” found online defies comparison to the…
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…Custer, James Bradley on racialized imperialism, and (most creditably) Douglas A. Blackmon on the significance of black convict labor. The issues that Lehmann takes on here could not be more urgent for people constructed like me who fume and fuss over the near-total absence of a powerful religious critique of the sorry state of our affairs: today’s degraded and degrading “on demand” labor market, the triumph of what Lehmann calls “the functional c…
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…inauguration, as when he would be sworn in as president for a second term. Lately, Trump and some supporters have begun to claim that he will be “reinstated” as president in August 2021, after there have been recounts in some states where, they believe, widespread voter fraud has taken place. (It shouldn’t be necessary, but sadly it is, to note here that there is no meaningful evidence of widespread voter fraud or that any recount would affect the…
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…pirituality. In fact, “religion and animals” themes appear in a surprising number of places—one example is Peter Miller’s article “Jane Goodall” in the December 1995 National Geographic, in which he discusses Goodall’s belief that expressions of awe by chimpanzees at a waterfall site “may resemble the emotions that led early humans to religion.” The debate over whether or not our animal neighbors can be “religious” is but one issue in the growing…
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…Berkeley, California, was sentenced to 30 days in jail for violating an Oakland law mandating a buffer between protesters and clinic patients. Hoye, who targets women entering abortion clinics to “draw attention to the devastating impact abortion has had on the African-American community,” was given the option of serving his 30 days through community service and a $1,100 fine—a sentence Hoye himself chose in favor of probation. As the Family Resea…
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…s that they are married to someone else’s spouse, so the nature of their relationship is extra-marital and outside the bounds of holiness. It is precisely analogous to the question of same-sex sexual relationships. So, ongoing adultery is the issue around divorce, but with the rise of the divorce rate the church realized if they applied the teaching in that way it was harmful to people. There is a strong tradition in Christianity that love does no…
Read More…ace and grace. (Note: I do not include the Lebanese intellectual Shaykh Fadlallah because of the following observation.) All these men made substantial contributions to the growth of Islam as a system of ideas without assuming or wanting to assume any form of political leadership. There is sometimes an unnecessary rift between leading ideas and leading people politically such that intellectuals who are also activists sometimes have to make tough c…
Read More…back against national groups picking states as laboratories for their legislation. If Oklahoma Republicans wind up galvanized against Personhood USA and Oklahomans for Life, is it possible that another red state’s legislature could become galvanized against, say, ALEC? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes surprising events are flukes. Sometimes they’re the start of a trend. Finally, it’s interesting that SB-1433 enjoyed such strong support from Archbishop…
Read More…the Bible under the sponsorship of the Protestant King James the VI of Scotland, a Lancaster minister, William Harrison, complained that “for one person which we have in the church to hear divine service, sermons and catechism, every piper (there be many in the parish) should at the same instant have many hundred on the greens.” The comparative success of the piper over the preacher in gathering locals was possible even though church attendance at…
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