Religion Dispatches
…At the Monkey Cage, political scientist John Sides observes that GOP victories in swing districts with Democratic incumbents had other causes: GOP gains had much more to do a simpler fact: when the political winds are blowing against a party, it’s the incumbents in the swing districts that are most likely to be blown out of office. And his colleague Eric McGhee notes that 2010 looks like a reverse of 2006 — when Democrats made big congressional g…
Read More…d yet in most LDS communities is a frank and searching discussion of the scriptural and doctrinal basis for opposition to the full equality of LGBT people. Are we still holding on to Old Testament stories about Sodom and Gomorrah which have been reexamined by Biblical scholars and found to be at their ancient textual roots not a condemnation of homosexuality? Yes, Mormons are. Are we still holding to Levitical prohibitions of homosexuality, which…
Read More…laced if lost or stolen, but only if you first write down each and every serial number. Then you have to keep this information somewhere that’s not the same somewhere you keep the checks. But then they really do NOT spend just like cash—especially abroad where we meet and mix with people in their own places. Such places are not subject to our being guests there. So I do tend toward keeping travel cash in an odd place. (No, I’m not gonna share with…
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…ed up Catholics to affiliate with whatever political party best met their priorities: social justice issues for left-leaning Catholics and sexual restraint, law-and-order, and a muscular national defense for right-leaning Catholics. And, as Jack Jenkins notes at Think Progress: …if this sort of dissenting spirit was unique among modern American Catholics, one could plausibly argue that the United States has created an environment that bifurcates C…
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…here is no scientific quest more religious than the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. But this outward search is, on a certain level, guaranteed to bring us back where we are. To illustrate, let us perform an interesting thought experiment. Let us place ourselves on Gliese 591g and turn those same telescopes around and observe us observing the universe. What a strange, strange sight. What a wonder. Clearly, it is we—not black holes, not da…
Read More…National Missionary Baptist Church National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. Mother A.M.E. Zion Church Lemeul Haynes Congregational Church Jewish Labor Committee Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral United Church of Christ American Muslim Association of North America (AMANA) Beulah Church of the Nazarene Bethel Tabernacle AME Church, Brooklyn Pax Christi USA Tikkun-Network of Spiritual Progressives Jewish Fund…
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…zations, including a confusion of witchcraft with Satanism, accusations of ritual sacrifice, evangelical exaggeration of the size and growth of witchcraft, and a misreading of fantasy, fairy tale, and horror depictions of witches as reflecting real-world practice. Although these disturbing tendencies won’t be disappearing soon, there are some promising changes on the horizon. A small group of evangelical academics, including the noted scholar of n…
Read More…ey practice before or after September 11. The new version does not characterize African-American Muslims, no matter how long we’ve practiced. I once designed a tee-shirt slogan to say: “Muslim by choice American by force.” When I described this at a luncheon table at this fancy-shmancy Islam and America conference in Qatar, a white guy at my table said, “That’s ridiculous. No one is American by force.” I said, “Well, now that is interesting. What…
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…sgender people has effects far beyond the individual target. This is what Iris Marion Young terms “systematic violence” in her famous “Five Faces of Oppression.” It is a violence of instrumentality—violence with the effect of keeping an entire group subjugated and in a state of oppression. Young argues, “Members of some groups live with the knowledge that they must fear random, unprovoked attacks on their persons or property, which have no motive…
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…er, Time again entered the fray of religious controversy with a cover featuring “Rebel Priests” Phillip and Daniel Berrigan, the anti-Vietnam activists serving federal prison sentences for burning draft cards with napalm. Not to be outdone, Newsweek brought out an issue with the words “Has the Church Lost Its Soul?” emblazoned on its cover. Taken together, the Time and Newsweek Catholic stories of the late 1960s and early 1970s suggest that, after…
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