Religion Dispatches
In 1970, at the age of four, I left Pakistan and came to Canada with my parents. At that time, there were less than 34,000 Muslims in all of Canada. By 2001, this number had grown to 579,600. While the population of Muslims grew tremendously in North America, we were almost absent from the array of characters portrayed on television. When I was a child, Hadji from reruns of the animated show Johnny Quest, was the only Muslim I could identify on t…
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…which less than half of residents supported the right to marry a same-sex partner. The same poll found that only 57% of Mississippians thought LGBT people should be protected from discrimination, compared to 70% of Americans overall. There aren’t current data on state-by-state support for interracial marriage, but while 18% of all newly married people in urban areas are married to someone of a different race, only 3% of newlyweds in Jackson, Miss…
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…he plight of 70 million forcefully-displaced refugees are uppermost on the papal mind. Francis calls the problem “globalized indifference,” which sums up the current attitude of many people who have the economic and social power to care concretely for all of creation but choose not to do so. The movie is more than a puff piece about Francis. Beautifully filmed scenes of a pre-Covid world include his travel to war-torn and refugee-laden lands. His…
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…role as providing opportunities for members of our community to more fully participate in American society, whether that be in politics, cultural institutions, or any number of other areas of life. That means doing more than simply being right about this one thing: the nonexistence of gods. It means finding partners who share our values and interests and working together to make this world a better place to live.” Clarifying that latter point, Fis…
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…it was later moved to private property so as not to violate church-state separation. A similar bill failed to pass in Texas last year, and it too prescribed the Commandments lite. While it’s tempting to let Olsen off the hook as an unoriginal copyist, he is the author of this bill and ultimately responsible for the content and the scriptural edits. So let’s be absolutely clear: if Olsen’s proposal becomes law, Oklahoma would be rewriting the Bible…
Read More…t’s not a proud day for freedom of religion when a prominent member of the number two most disliked major religion in America effectively sides against a honest project by the number one most disliked major religion in America. Especially when Mormons have just recently come through our own years-long struggle to build an LDS temple in Center City Philadelphia after Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter tried to extract a six-figure sum from the Churc…
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…courts; namely, that discussions of religion should neither promote nor disparage particular religious beliefs, nor favor religion or non-religion over the other. The First Amendment Center’s The Bible & Public Schools: A First Amendment Guide and the Society of Biblical Literature’s Bible Electives in Public Schools: A Guide provided a starting point from which to consider whether a course’s approach could be considered nonsectarian. The results…
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…ny state-sanctioned persecution. Instead, the mukhannathun are an accepted part of society. In the Abbasid caliphate many mukhannathun would become personal companions and courtiers of the caliph. Trained in the art of music, poetry, astronomy, and wit, no court was complete without them. According to ibn Mansur al-‘Abi, the mukhannathun became so valuable to the Islamic courts that one boasted: “We are the best of people, when we speak, you laugh…
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…e mandate and who fostered outrage over the supposed violation of religious freedom that has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. It’s a case where the numbers matter, but many people don’t seem to pay all that much attention to them….
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…were willing to accept the support of “people like me” in the upcoming campaign, reviving the party’s big tent approach on the divisive issue. “I’m not going to try to earn your vote by tricking you,” the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., told her. “I am pro-choice, and I believe that a woman ought to be able to make that decision. “The best I can offer is that if we can’t agree on where to draw the line, the next best thing we can do is agree on…
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