Rap Sheet
Links on R&P from around the web
Dalai Lama, Twitter Rock Star: The Virtual Influence of His Holiness
posted on August 7, 2012At The Daily Beast, Melinda Liu chronicles the Dali Lama’s relationship with social media. With close to 5 million Twitter followers, the Dali Lama’s tech team tweets “one- or two-sentence spiritual aphorisms” and manages his Facebook page. Liu writes, “The Dalai Lama is quite happy to contemplate the karma of digital technology while leaving geeky details to the younger crowd.”
GOP Steers Clear of Gay Marriage Issue
posted on August 7, 2012After Democrats officially included gay marriage in their 2012 platform, Politico’s Maggie Haberman and Emily Schultheis note, “the reaction from mainstream Republicans was near silence.” This reticence to make gay marriage a election year issue contrasts sharply with 2004, when “Republicans, looking to turn out their base, put gay marriage bans on ballots in key states.” “The gay marriage issue for the anti-gay marriage right has always been one of those issues of diminishing returns,” says GOProud co-founder, Christopher Barron. “[A]nd it’s gotten to the point now where it’s often a loser.”
Are These Sisters Dangerous Women?
posted on August 7, 2012At The National Catholic Reporter, Patrick T. Reardon argues that it isn’t just the Catholic hierarchy that portrays nuns in a negative light. Reardon writes, “the disrespect that modern society–whether Hollywood or the Vatican–accords to nuns” is pervasive. Reardon suggests that “American culture goes to such great efforts to misunderstand nuns … because women religious are a challenge to the status quo.”
Read at National Catholic Reporter
Sikhism: An Introduction and Essays
posted on August 6, 2012On Sunday, at least seven people were killed at a mass shooting at The Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, in Oak Creek. Oak Creek Police Chief John Edwards said that the attack is being treated as a “domestic-type terrorist incident.” Harvard’s Pluralism Project has published an introduction to Sikhism, as well as several essays on Sikh life in America.
While Mormon Men Brawl, Mormon Women Talk Gender Equality
posted on August 6, 2012America’s two most prominent Mormon politicians, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Mitt Romney, have recently waged a much-publicized dispute over Romney’s taxes. “While the Mormon men folk are brawling in public,” writes Joanna Brooks at Religion Dispatches, “it’s worth noting that this summer has seen a quiet building among Mormon women of a new and unprecedentedly broad conversation about gender inequality in the LDS Church.”
Congress Passes Restrictions On Military Funeral Protests, Delivers Blow To Westboro Baptist Church
posted on August 6, 2012At The Huffington Post, Nick Wing reports that Congress has recently passed a bill aimed at curbing the ability of members of the Westboro Baptist Church to disrupt the funerals of U.S. military personnel. “The Honoring America’s Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act of 2012,” which is now headed to President Obama for approval, does not allow protesters to picket during the two hours before or after a funeral. Wing also notes that the bill “requires protestors to be at least 300 feet away from grieving family members.”
Making Aliyah for the Olympics
posted on August 6, 2012At Tablet, Stephanie Butnick explains why some American-born Jewish athletes have chosen to compete for Israel at the Olympic Games in London. “[T]he ability to compete for Israel has given them the opportunity to be big fishes in a smaller pond,” writes Butnick. “People know who I am,” notes pole vaulter, Jillian Schwartz. “The country is totally supportive of us.”
Russia’s Failure to Protect Freedom of Religion
posted on August 6, 2012At The Moscow Times, Katrina Lantos Swett and Robert George argue that the U.S. “should continue to hold Russia accountable” for its human rights abuses, particular those involving religious freedom. Swett and George, members of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, write, “Over the past decade, the Kremlin has exploited legitimate security concerns about violent religious extremism by restricting the rights of nonviolent religious minority members.”
A Fast Food Loyalty Rooted in Southern Identity
posted on August 6, 2012“Food has always been a complex issue in the South, where the country’s most distinct culinary region often eats its supper against a backdrop of race and religion,” writes Kim Severson for The New York Times. Severson notes that for Southerners, the choice to eat at Chick-fil-A is more complex than whether patrons back the decision of the franchise’s president, Dan Cathy, to publicly denounce same-sex marriage. “People here are both proud and fiercely protective of homegrown brands whose reach, like that of the 1,600-store Chick-fil-A chain, has stretched past Southern borders,” writes Severson.
Vatican Showdown the Latest Chapter in Sister Pat Farrell’s Dramatic Life
posted on August 6, 2012At Religion News Service, Daniel Burke profiles Sister Pat Farrell, the president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an organization which represents 80 percent of America’s Catholic nuns. The Catholic hierarchy in Rome has recently rebuked the LCWR for embracing what the Vatican calls “radical feminism,” and for focusing too much on social justice concerns. Burke writes, “it is Farrell’s own life–a vocation that has taken her from the Iowa heartland to ministry in Pinochet’s Chile and war-ravaged El Salvador and back again to Iowa–that may be the best way to understand the root of Rome’s clash with the nuns, and why it may not be going away anytime soon.”