Religion Dispatches
…d respect our constitution and that freedom. We trust that legislation in any state would address training of weapon use in a public environment, be it a church, amusement park, or shopping mall. ++++++++++ Crossing Paths: Rev. Joseph Lowery and Rev. Sun Myung Moon While many people no doubt believe that the operations of Rev. Sun Myung Moon are so last century, there is every indication to believe that Moon’s political influence will last well in…
Read More…e larger point: Trump is still the one candidate who coalesces the largest number of evangelicals—even the weekly churchgoers—around him. Those numbers would likely shift should Trump face a two-man race with Ted Cruz. But if survey data still show what they have revealed so far—that Trump will continue to win at least a third of the most frequent church-attending evangelicals—it undermines anti-Trump evangelicals’ main argument about the suspect…
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…television. When I was a child, Hadji from reruns of the animated show Johnny Quest, was the only Muslim I could identify on television, with the added bonus that he was also a fellow East Indian. However, I was puzzled as to how a child could have made the pilgrimage to Mecca and earned the title of “Hajji,” and as someone who spoke Urdu/Hindi and Punjabi, I had no idea what his magic words “sim sim salabim” meant. There was an Arab character (Cp…
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…sippi Clarion Ledger reported earlier this year that the overall growth in number of interracial couples in Mississippi was behind the national average (less than 2.4 percentage points in Mississippi compared to 2.8 percentage points nationally). According to a report released by Pew Research Center in 2017, only 9% of Americans say that interracial marriage is “a bad thing,” while 17% of respondents to a 2018 YouGov poll said that interracial mar…
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…the film that there are just a handful of Catholic women in the world. Evgeny Afineevsky crafted his film with the Covid reality in mind. He portrays Pope Francis as a generous, humble man: a sharp contrast to one U.S. presidential contender whom Afineevsky opposes. Climate change and the plight of 70 million forcefully-displaced refugees are uppermost on the papal mind. Francis calls the problem “globalized indifference,” which sums up the curren…
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…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, Fish noted, “Our advocacy is going to continue working to find areas of common ground with p…
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…th centuries during the Iconoclastic Controversy. And then there are the many differences between various Jewish and Christian sects in how to number and interpret these different sets of commandments. All of this I explain in my book, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American. Seemingly small differences are magnified because Christianity has historically claimed to possess ultimate truth, so any deviation from an absolute truth…
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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…a worksheet on the New Testament book of Hebrews: “Could the Old Law make anyone perfect? What made the old covenant obsolete? If we sin willfully, what no longer remains?” A reading utilized in another district explained why God had rejected the Jews (at least for now): It wasn’t the killing the Messiah that put the Jews at odds with God. After all He came to die for them. No. It’s that in killing Him, they refused to let his death pay for their…
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…s in early Muslim societies. Notably absent from al-Isfahani’s records is any 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 co…
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