Religion Dispatches
…from Houston, Texas was profiled by everyone from Psychology Today to the New York Times. Some stories zeroed in on Williamson’s celebrity connections (BFFs with Oprah Winfrey and David Geffen, officiating at one of Liz Taylor’s weddings) while others sniggered at her “New Age teachings.” But few mentioned the social activism that had been a continuous thread through her career. That activism—from the 1989 founding of Project Angel Food, which pr…
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…idate “who argued gay soldiers were weakening the country’s military.” The New York Times cited critics who called Moon’s statement “a stark tactic to win support among conservative voters.” In South Korea, the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are a largely taboo and politically unpopular subject. In recent years, powerful right-wing Christian groups have intensified a campaign against homosexuality, scuttling a bill that wo…
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…otal defense of religious freedom comparable to Civil Rights-era activism. Stories like these and the news from Oakland reveal that Mormons in many places are struggling to come to terms with the legacy of the Proposition 8 campaign and the longer history of Mormon attitudes towards homosexuality. As Carol Lynn Pearson, the Mormon LGBT advocate who attended the September 19 Oakland meeting, observes: I think the people who didn’t see [Proposition…
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…he duty of scholars of religion and theologians is to expose the religious stories that construct this ecocidal scaffolding, rending apart wildlife preservation and those diverse coalitions of peoples and creatures coalescing to protect the water and the land. We must expose these stories because the atmospheric flesh winding itself through all of our earthen creativity requires an evil banality of many people in power praying to the status quo. W…
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…leaders, reflects the moral decay of society, not an open, more accepting world. Or, as Santorum told viewers of Fox News: “There are all sorts of studies out there that suggest just the contrary, and there are people who were gay and lived the gay lifestyle and aren’t anymore.” Amateur Hour As conservative Christians adopt a counterview on sex and gender, they learn alternate versions of history, too. Populist historians within evangelicalism, l…
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…ost’s articles explained, part of the answer lay in the careful parsing of words. It’s true, for instance, that there’s no new “law” requiring family separation. But there is a new “zero-tolerance” policy (now possibly rescinded) of prosecuting adults for crossing the border. That prosecution can, by Administration discretion about how to apply and prosecute the law, lead to family separation. Thus, “the law” did exist under the Obama administrati…
Read More…and conspiracy theories are much, much more dangerous than any small-time blog. Beck may not be explicit about his religious take on the current events, but his “teaching theater” feeds into many end-times beliefs. Too bad there isn’t a million person march to Fox News headquarters to demand that Roger Ailes pull the plug on Beck. Hey, it’s a fantasy, but you never know….
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…ov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass.: Well, I’m not a spokesman for my church. I’m not running for pastor in chief. I’m running for commander in chief. So the best place to go for my church’s doctrines would be my church. Stephanopoulos: But I’m talking about how they will take it, how they will perceive it. Romney: I understand, but that doesn’t happen to be a doctrine of my church. Our belief is just as it says in the Bible, that the messiah will come to Je…
Read More…movement, and since they were not admitting LGBT students then he went to New York to be ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary that was ordaining openly gay and lesbian students in the Conservative Jewish movement. However, Israel’s Masorti Movement changed its own stance two years ago allowing for Israeli-trained lesbian and gay rabbis to join the Conservative movement in the country and committed itself to supporting and embracing gay and…
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…titles as “Argument from the Eternity of Irony” or the “Argument from The New York Times.” But if this suggests broad comedy or even farce, the reader will not find it in this book. In fact, Goldstein’s novel represents one of the more sensitive, humorous explorations of religious thematics from an atheist perspective. In other words, Goldstein takes religion and the religious impulse seriously, even as she exposes the various obstacles to human…
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