Posts in month: May, 2009

Dr. Tiller’s Murder
by the Rev. Carlton Veazey
CEO, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice
Jeff | May 31, 2009 | 6:19 pm

The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice extends our deepest sympathy and our prayers to the family of Dr. George Tiller, who was assassinated this morning in the lobby of Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, where he was a member of the congregation. Dr. Tiller was a person of conscience and faith, who provided abortion services for women in the greatest medical need despite frequent threats, lawsuits and violence. He was one of the very few doctors providing medically indicated late-term abortion services and he did not waver from the provision of this service, although he was well aware he was never far from danger.

While we do not know at this time if the murder of Dr. Tiller was religiously motivated, the fact that the murder took place in his church reminds us that some people use religion as an excuse for acts of hatred. Let us remember that violence and murder are perversions of religion, and let us– as people of faith – speak out forcefully and unambiguously against those who foment hatred by their words.

As people of faith, the RCRC family condemns both words and acts of hatred.

Tragically, there were many warning signs that this cruel act could take place. Dr. Tiller’s clinic was severely vandalized earlier this month and it was reported that Dr. Tiller had asked the FBI to investigate the incident. Today, as we mourn the loss of Dr. Tiller, we urge the federal government to take swift action against the person or persons who committed this act.

The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice is the nation’s interfaith coalition of religious and religiously affiliated organizations from 15 denominations and faith traditions that support reproductive choice on religious grounds.

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Science and religion: A marriage made in Victorian England
by Lisa Earle Mcleod
Jeff | May 11, 2009 | 12:18 pm

It was an unlikely marriage. He was a scientist and she was a religious studies major. He went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for a book about evolution. She became a children’s book author, often writing about religious holidays. 

But it was their pillow talk about Charles Darwin and his devoutly religious wife that prompted her to explore the intimate details of another marriage of science and religion, the marriage of Charles and Emma Darwin. 

Author Deborah Heiligman’s newest book “Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith,” has its roots in the bedtime conversations she had with her husband, Jonathan Weiner, while he was writing his award winning, “The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time.” 

Weiner shared with Heiligman that Darwin’s wife Emma had been deeply concerned that Charles’ work on evolution was going to sentence him to eternal damnation, and that they would be separated for eternity. 

As they discussed Charles and Emma’s differing perspectives, it was obvious that the Darwin’s marriage was not unlike their own. Two intelligent people of strong convictions who loved each other, but who looked at the world through different lenses. 

Science versus religion arguments continue to rage even today, 150 years after Darwin first published the Origin of Species, but Charles and Emma’s differing perspectives didn’t divide them. 

Quite the contrary; the deeply religious Emma was Charles’ most frequent and helpful editor, and much like Heiligman and Weiner, the Darwin’s marital dialect expanded their partners’ perspective rather than assaulting it. 

Drawn from first person diaries, family letters and Darwin’s published notebooks, “Charles and Emma” opens shortly after Charles Darwin arrived home from his famous voyage as a naturalist on the HMS Beagle, where he collected the data that would later form the basis for his controversial work. 

As a young man from a prominent 19th century London family, Charles was expected to marry and start a family. However, he felt conflicted. So, ever the researcher, he drew a line down the middle of a piece of scrap paper, on the left side her wrote Marry. On the right he wrote Not Marry. And in the middle: This is the Question. 

The pros ultimately outweighed the cons, and Charles found a soul mate and spouse in his cousin Emma. “Charles and Emma,” (a rousing romantic narrative aimed at young adults but enjoyed immensely by this 40-something reader) provides an intimate glimpse into the Darwin’s marriage and a life different from the stereotypical reserved Victorian household. 

Charles Darwin was, for the times, a radically involved father playing with, and even bathing his children. He worked right in the middle of their home – Down House – with his children running in and out of his study all day and he frequently involved them in his experiments. 

He also routinely discussed his work with Emma, whose opinion was of utmost importance to him. His love and respect for his intelligent and deeply devout wife caused Charles to rethink how the world might receive his ideas, prompting him to document his theory of natural selection for decades before publishing it. 

Heiligman (www.DeborahHeiligman.com) says she wrote “Charles and Emma” to demonstrate that “people who have differing opinions can live together and love each other, and keep talking about it.” 

Science and religion, it was a happily ever after for the Darwins; perhaps the rest of us can make the marriage work as well.

Lisa Earle McLeod is a syndicated columnist, author, keynote speaker and business consultant who specializes in helping individuals and organizations create happiness and success. For more info – www.ForgetPerfect.com <www.ForgetPerfect.com>

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Public Piety
Jeff | May 9, 2009 | 8:33 am

This was sent to the editor of the Chattanooga Times-Free Press on May 9, 2009:

A letter in today’s (May 9) Times-Free Press, complains that President Obama “ignored” the National Day of Prayer. 

At the National Prayer Breakfast, he alluded to the Golden Rule—something found in all religions.  He pointedly warned against using religion to divide people.   He said, “In a world that grows smaller by the day, perhaps we can begin to crowd out the destructive forces of zealotry and make room for the healing power of understanding. This is my hope. This is my prayer.”

He issued a proclamation in which he echoed his remarks at the Prayer Breakfast.  It can be read at <www.whitehouse.gov>.

What the President did not do is make a big show of his religious sensitivities; he did not indulge in public piety.  He followed the advice of Jesus found in Matthew, 6:5-6  ”And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”

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Unnatural Acts
by Melissa Conroy
Jeff | May 8, 2009 | 5:17 pm

On May 4, 2009 the BBC’s top stories included the headline “‘Gay man’ disinterred in Senegal.”  The article told how a gay man died and was buried in a Muslim cemetery, only to be disinterred twice.  In the first instance his body was left outside the grave, and in the second, his body was dumped outside his family’s house.  The man has now been buried away from the cemetery.  The article explains how homosexuality has been outlawed in Senegal, a nation that has had a long tradition of “Goor-jiggen” (men-women) who “dress up as women, socialize with females and have long been tolerated in Senegal.”  However, local imams, media outlets, and the courts have worked to change that attitude, denouncing this behavior as homosexuality – and homosexuality as criminal.  The courts have recently gone so far as to sentence nine homosexual people to eight years in jail for “indecent conduct and unnatural acts.”

A seemingly disparate article, also one of the BBC’s top stories this May, dealt with another act deemed “unnatural” by religious authorities.  Titled “Court grants teen breast removal,” this article describes a situation in Australia, where a biologically female teenager, known as Alex, has won the right to have his breasts removed in order to fully transition to a male identity.  Alex has been diagnosed with “gender identity dysphoria,” “a psychological condition where a person believes they are the opposite sex.”  Family Court chief justice Diana Bryant stated that having breasts was “quite an impediment to his social development, which everyone thought was very important.”  Since the age of thirteen, Alex has been on hormone treatment to prevent the onset of menstruation.  Criticism has come from Catholic groups.  Pointing to the American medical definition of gender dysphoria as psychosis, Nicholas Tonti-Filippini of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family has stated that treating gender dysphoria with an operation is inappropriate:  In an online Catholic news source, he is reported as saying, “What you are trying to do is make a biological reality correspond to that false belief.

These two cases raise interesting questions for the scholar of religion, gender, and sexuality.  In the case of Senegal, one sees how the regulation of sexuality by religion has influenced not only funerary and sexuality practices, but also how gender has become conflated with sexuality.  “Goor-jiggen,” who are cited as men who “dress” and “socialize with women” are clearly labeled as homosexuals in the Senegalese Muslim mindset.  In the case of Australia, one sees how the physical body, one’s sex, interferes with one’s desired gender expression.  The term, “gender identity dysphoria” – however controversial – points to an anxiety in many places in the world.  One expects that a body will be the same as its expression.  When these do not match, Western medicine considers it psychosis and its remedy, as Tonti-Filippini points out, is to use surgery to make them match.

While many cultures have what anthropologist Serena Nanda has called “gender variants,” that is, a range of sex/gender positions that lie between purely male/masculine and purely female/feminine people, we have become accustomed to thinking that two sexes are natural.  In popular, medical, and some forms of religious discourse, sex and gender appear to be “naturally” aligned.  Anne Bolin has noted that “in the Western paradigm women are people with vaginas; therefore, if a man believes himself to be a woman, he must look the part, down to the genitals.  This paradigm has no room for the social woman with male genitals as is found elsewhere in the world.”  Sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, and gender role are understood to relate in a “natural” way that forms bipolar states with little room for anyone who mixes the categories or stands between them.

It is clear that Christian and Muslim discourse define a dimorphic sense of the body, envisioned in the creation story of Adam and Eve.  While many cultures create categories like “men-women,” Western religious thought deems this hybrid state as unnatural.  Yet many religious traditions from cultures as diverse as India, Thailand, and native North America, have myths that suggest that humanity was never meant to be understood as a binary system.

Perhaps what is “unnatural” in both of these stories is the presumption that a particular religious discourse can fully regulate an unruly body and its practices into a religious system.  “Men-women” have become the criminalized “homosexuals” of Senegal, a “gay” man is left unburied, and the transsexual teenager lives with the medical diagnosis of “psychosis”:  These are the realities of religious intolerance.  I am left wondering what, in fact, is “natural.”

Melissa Conroy is Assistant Professor of Religion in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Muskingum College, New Concord, Ohio.

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
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