In the New York Times, Nicolas Kristoff suggests that if secular liberals and religious actors who are working to help those in need could bridge their differences on issues of sexual morality, the world would be much better off.
Posts Tagged ‘sexuality’
February 17th, 2010
Haggling over Ted Haggard’s identity
posted by Nathan SchneiderEver since revelations of his tryst with a male prostitute became public in 2006, Ted Haggard has been a visible focal point for the evangelical community’s encounter with homosexuality. In an interview with Kathryn Joyce at Religion Dispatches, Haggard’s wife Gayle describes how the incident and its fallout has affected her thinking about sexual identity and, as she repeatedly puts it, the spiritual “journey.”
January 27th, 2010
Nussbaum on sexual orientation and religion
posted by Nathan SchneiderAt the OUPblog, Martha Nussbaum suggests a Constitutional parallel between religion and sexual orientation.
January 14th, 2010
Why Ugandans embrace the Family
posted by Ruth BraunsteinAt New America Media, Edwin Okong’o suggests that the U.S. Christian Right has been successful in influencing the Ugandan anti-gay agenda because Africans “staunchly believe in the supremacy of the white man. Ill-informed Christians [...] place the white man immediately below the Holy Trinity, a belief with its roots in the colonial era.”
December 1st, 2009
Witness to compassion
posted by Ruth BraunsteinAt Progressive Revival, and in honor of World AIDS Day, Diana Butler Bass bears witness to the compassion of her friend and “evangelical hero” Jeffrey Michael.
September 22nd, 2008
The ruse of “secular humanism”
posted by Michael WarnerDiscussions of the secular can often be peculiarly remote. Whenever secularism is imagined as unbelief, or political neutrality, or an empty social space to be filled up with religious pluralism, it can be difficult to remember how it can also serve as a framework of corporeal experience and struggle. We are used to associating corporeal discipline and affect with religion, but not with the secular. So it might be excusable to begin with some personal reflection, not for the sake of autobiography but in order to tether analysis in some awareness of how the problem comes to have stakes. [...]
January 10th, 2008
Sex and the subject of religion
posted by Tracy Fessenden
The current campaign within the Archdiocese of New York to canonize the radical activist Dorothy Day (1897-1980) offers a good example of what Elizabeth Povinelli, writing here on December 13 (“Can Sex be a Minor Form of Spitting?”), calls the “mutual conditions and secret agreements” that tie the sexual revolution and Catholic teaching together behind the scenes—and of the “transformation in the field of sin” sealed in their alliance. It isn’t simply that the candor with which Cardinal O’Connor and now Cardinal Egan have described Day’s sexual agency, single motherhood, and presumed abortion signals the Church’s accommodation to new, post-1960s norms of frankness.
January 9th, 2008
Practicing sex, practicing democracy
posted by Ann PellegriniWhy is it that sex is such a central part of American political life anyway? Why, when The New York Times reported on the influence of “values” voters on the 2004 Presidential election, did the Times name only two “values,” both of them reflecting a conservative sexual ethic: opposition to abortion and opposition to “recognition of lesbian and gay couples”?
January 8th, 2008
Marriage plots
posted by Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini
Despite the putative separation of church and state, one of the major places in the U.S. where religion and the state remained entwined is around sexuality, specifically at the point of marriage, where religious officials are actually empowered to act on behalf of the state. And whenever politicians talk about marriage laws, they nearly always do so with reference to religious commitments—and the political affiliation or philosophy of the policymaker doesn’t much matter in terms of this outcome.
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