Religion Dispatches
…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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…e of abortion rights advocates to the charges is the partial—though very limited—truth to the charges. Margaret Sanger did embrace the popular theory of eugenics in the 1920s, though as Planned Parenthood and historian Ellen Chesler have clearly documented, her positions were far more nuanced, voluntary, and individualistic than the caricature preferred by anti-abortion activists, and she worked in partnership with esteemed black leaders of the da…
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…sion of evangelicalism which will be inclusive of LGBT people. There are a number of evangelicals that are very open to this and are having the same experience I had of actually knowing gay and lesbian people, so I think it’s inevitable. I think there will be a sector of evangelicalism that will go past mainline protestant denominations, which have more institutional restraints. The more autonomous congregations will outpace them in acceptance. Th…
Read More…th, for both are part of my devotion to Allah). They do have a substantial number of women included, so I would not complain on that count. But, here’s the thing: there are no women under the category of Muslim intellectuals. Apparently women don’t think. So it is even harder to adjust to the loss of these three men whose intellectual contributions helped to shape the ways we think about and in fact live Islam today; both for women and for men. I…
Read More…for Reproductive Justice who did their own lobbying, and ultimately a good number of legislators themselves. It seems that’s when the personhood battle really became a power struggle between the personhood lobby and the Republican leadership. With so many amendments and so much public controversy surrounding the bill, the Republican leadership opted not to bring the bill forward. This raised the ire of Personhood USA and Oklahomans for Life, who c…
Read More…r struggles and personal conflict to organize a space of their own. “We permitted our program to go to the drain,” said Luis Poyser, who has been an activist and politician in Panama’s black Islamic movement for decades. But Walid Handauz, an Arab leader in the mosque, said no tension exists between Arab and black Panamanian Muslims. Opinions differ on interpretations of the religion, but ultimately everyone is Muslim. “We try to gather everyone i…
Read More…outs for church-related/owned businesses, the ordinances in SLC inspired a number of other Utah and Idaho towns and cities to follow suit and opened many conservative Mormon’s eyes to some problems they’d never before considered. – There have been no church-sponsored efforts aimed at mobilizing Mormons to fight same-sex marriage at the polls the way Mormons were mobilized in California in 2008, despite efforts of other religions originally part of…
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…to trans rights. She’s also a staunch anti-choice activist. A significant number of the other signatories are members of a right-wing German think tank called, innocently enough, “Netzwerk für Wissenschaftsfreiheit” (Network for the Freedom of Science). This Network peddles reactionary talking points about allegedly “left-wing” universities and “cancel culture” while its website treats “race science” as legitimate scholarly discourse. The anti-tr…
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…ted self—perfected personalities I dreamed of becoming through fastidious imitation (imitatio Dei). Ironically, isn’t that what both leper messiahs had done—passed as gods? “Don’t dream it, be it” is the first commandment of celebrity culture, sung by Dr. Frank N. Further, the “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania,” in the glam-camp musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show (which debuted, on the stage, in the Ziggy-mad year of 1973, and…
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…t of otherwise legitimate protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza), and a number of violent incidents, there was a large public vigil in Berlin to protest anti-Semitism. Among the attendees were German President Joachim Guack, members of Germany’s parliament, leaders of both of the country’s major churches, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who declared: “Jewish life is part of our identity and culture… Whoever discriminates and ostracizes has…
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