Religion Dispatches
Attitudes about sex have come to signal a person or group’s attitudes about modernity itself. Arguments about gender roles, birth control, abortion, sex education, and LGBTQ rights have become central to the religious and political identity of American Christians.
Read MoreThe past two popes insist, against mounting evidence, that the gender binary, male and female, is given in nature and blessed by God. God, a male after all, created them Male and Female. The Genesis account inconveniently leaves out the detail about the blue and pink blankets and onesies.
Read MoreThe Christian nationalist intentions of Project Blitz have also received much attention, but a remarkable episode in Minnesota this past state legislative session may be a harbinger of a more profoundly theocratic politics on the horizon.
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If they were to fully and meaningfully implement this policy, I doubt that the Convention would be left with any churches as members, for they all remain complicit with racist and sexist structures that rob many of us of our very humanity.
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While the “exvangelical” community was designed to help former evangelicals heal from a toxic environment, a subgroup of exvangelicals calling itself the “Magdalene Collective” released a statement that’s been called transphobic and that many see as a replication of the very abusive patterns from which they’d been trying to escape.
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Bible scholar Michael Coogan’s new book examines the dangers associated with the biblical concept of chosenness, which has its fingerprints on everything from the genocidal treatment of indigenous peoples to the idea that women, when thought by believers to have been created as mere vessels for reproduction, may be treated in the manner of brood cattle.
Read MoreTeaching made me aware of how uncomfortable people in the United States are about death—and how their religious practices contribute to this discomfort. Since my terminal diagnosis I’ve found that our problem concerns the most central question we ask about religion.
Read MoreWhile the “religious freedom” industry is busy protecting discriminatory bakeries and pharmacists who refuse to do their job, a humanitarian faces a hefty prison sentence for providing food and water to migrants in the desert.
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While some have argued that opposition to a woman’s right to make decisions about her body is a legitimate religious freedom issue, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the religious freedom issue at stake in the abortion debate.
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Advocates of school yoga and mindfulness are no doubt sincere when they speak of these practices as secular resources that are desperately needed by a troubled education system, but there are compelling reasons to be skeptical.
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