Religion Dispatches
…Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Diego, and the founder of Farm Forward, met with Cubit co-editor Andrew Aghapour at a coffee shop in Chapel Hill, North Carolina to explore how religion applies to elephants, dogs, chimpanzees, and factory farming. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. As a scholar of religion, why do you think it’s wrong see religion as exclusive to humans? I think mos…
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…of like a fine June day in the Midwest. A major trailhead into the mighty San Gabriels beckoned—a trailhead five minutes from where I live. I knew I wouldn’t regret my choice. And indeed the bracing climb through the microclimates along the trail—the changing fragrances and flora (lupines!) at nearly each turn on my way up to 5,000 feet—created a rush of pleasures both spiritual and corporeal. Time was when I would fret and fuss over what to me w…
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…ian ethos in black America. These theologically conservative communions outnumber and overwhelm the influence and theological visions of Christian traditions that are stereotypically progressive such as the United Church Christ and the United Methodist Church. The stark reality is that the overwhelming majority of black Christians have more in common, theologically, with Southern Baptists, the Church of God, and the Assemblies of God than with Epi…
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…e organization—a decision most likely spurred by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News’s bombshell 2019 investigation revealing over 700 victims of sexual abuse within the SBC over the past two decades. To Brown, the sway evangelical faith leaders have over the power brokers of the Republican Party spells sure disaster. “When people talk about turning the US into a Christian nation, it makes me quake to ponder what that would mean for…
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…n Bailout! Advocacy Campaign Marjorie Dannenfelser, the President of the Susan B. Anthony List, recently announced plans for the Stop the Abortion Bailout! advocacy campaign, which according to the group’s press release, aims to convince the Senate to preserve “federal abortion funding restrictions.” The campaign intends “to secure the 41 votes necessary to sustain a filibuster against measures promoting federal taxpayer funding of abortion.” The…
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…congregants. It was for this reason that Shinta helped found the Pondok Pesantren Waria al-Fatah, the world’s only Islamic boarding school for transgender people. “In the public mosque we made people uncomfortable. We needed a safe place for trans women to pray,” she says. Since its establishment in 2008 the boarding school, or pesantren, has become a safe haven for trans people from across Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation. “…
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…ad list of crazed attackers that includes the killers at the Columbine and Sandy Hook schools. On the other hand, he was ethnically a Muslim, which automatically convicts him in some simplistic minds. And he is said to have shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”) before the police opened fire on him at the end of his murderous rampage. This phrase, however, is somewhat like the English language expression, “Lord of mercy,” that can be expressed by…
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…ties to Honduras’ Roman Catholic and evangelical churches, in the city of San Pedro Sula, was strangled to death last June. Cattrachas, a Tegucigalpa-based lesbian feminist network, notes 229 LGBT Hondurans are known to have been killed between 2009-2016. New Zealand: Plans to offer reversal of convictions for old sodomy law violations The government is planning to create a process allowing men convicted under a pre-1986 law against same-sex acti…
Read More…ulment, but it must be for cause like bigamy, fraud, or incest. But as the San Diego News Network reports: “I don’t want to be married to you anymore” doesn’t count. While the anti-gay marriage people may roll their eyes at such a suggestion, Marcotte’s measure makes several points clear. First, heterosexuals, who fight tooth and nail to keep gay people from getting married, make a mockery of the institution every single day, from Britney Spears’…
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…acred spaces: a legendary studio (Sun Studios in Memphis), a hotel room in San Antonio (where blues legend Robert Johnson cut some epochal sides in 1936), and, most significantly for this article, the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia. The first two are hallowed ground of American musical recording history. The third is the oldest black Baptist congregation in the country; so far as I know, it has no history of being used as a back…
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