Religion Dispatches
…r 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 gains at a time when a Republican president was falling out of favor. Sapp, in his post-election lament that the Democrats didn’t liste…
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…of conservative Catholics that Trump assembled in October, he promised, “I will stand with Catholics and fight for you”: I will defend your religious liberties and the right to fully and freely practice your religion, as individuals, business owners and academic institutions. I will make absolutely certain religious orders like The Little Sisters of Poor are not bullied by the federal government because of their religious beliefs. And while the Ca…
Read More…es to the reality of LGBT experience. Just a few weeks ago, I was visiting with a friend who has a gay adult child. We discussed the nuances of the recent events surrounding Elder Boyd K. Packer’s abrasive and controversial October conference talk which asserted that God would never have people be born with “tendencies” to same-sex attraction, and which drew hurtful, crude comparisons between the electoral battle to establish civil equality for LG…
Read More…to have the notes done today and start speaking to them by tomorrow. That will be my last day, and I don’t want anything hanging over my head about local logistics, because I can’t take them with me and I don’t want to have any overdue amounts on that account either. Meanwhile, I am still collecting prayer requests and that means praying now and still remembering to call their names at Arafat. Yesterday I learned that a dear, dear friend has just…
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…when US-backed right-wing dictators were engaged in vicious internecine conflicts with Communist-backed forces. It’s no coincidence that Catholic defection to the Republican Party during the Reagan era coincided with the start of John Paul II’s papacy. John Paul’s emphasis on opposition to abortion as a core Catholic value—and his warnings about a pro-choice “culture of death“—perfectly meshed with the Republican Party’s use of abortion as a wedge…
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…not waste so much space. My point is that this objection had nothing to do with science and, to my mind, had everything to do with a basic human resistance to accepting that we are much smaller—and therefore much more inconsequential—than we would like to believe. The universe has grown enormously since Brahe’s time, and with every step the earth has become tinier, its inhabitants more inconsequential, and, paradoxically, more ignorant. And with e…
Read More…en it hits me: good. Good that they’re lumping the religious left [sic] in with the scary people who want to distribute the money differently and help poor people. Good that they’re lumping us in with the people who think such radical thoughts as: conservative religious nutjobs should not be given a free pass to run the nation, and gays and lesbians should enjoy equal protection under the law. Good that they think we’re a bunch of wild-eyed radica…
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…t tends to rehearse various mischaracterizations, 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 ac…
Read More…can Muslims outnumber them, and face double invisibility and erasure: from within and from without. So, if you ever wonder why I don’t comment on some of the “top” stories in the news about Islam in America, I intentionally try not to respond to sensationalism. I don’t comment about a story if the story already gets enough media attention and if the story does not help script the dynamics of Islam in American in the ways in which it is internally…
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…strumental, systematic violence. It intends to silence and to destroy from within. While most of us will never be physically attacked by another human being, all of us know we are targets. A Theology of Anti-Gay Bullying Anti-gay bullying is a theological issue because it has a theological base. I find it difficult to believe that even those among us with a vibrant imagination can muster the creative energy to picture a reality in which anti-gay v…
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