I was sure that coming out as trans would end my employment by Yeshiva University, but after months when I was forbidden to set foot on campus, the unthinkable happened.
2010
It’s Time to Heal a Mega-Church Psychosis
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There is a psychosis that permeates many churches with regard to the presence and involvement of same-gender-loving (SGL) people, who have great love for God and for their church communities.
2010
Coming Home to Who We Are: Buddhist Spiritual Practice and Transformation
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As a young Asian American boy living in a mainstream Philadelphia suburb, I experienced many events of discrimination and racism that I did not know how to handle in my little life
2010
Same-Sex Weddings, Hindu Traditions, and Modern India
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Same-sex desire and even sexual activity have been represented and discussed in Indian literature for two millennia, often in a nonjudgmental and even celebratory manner, but a new virulent form of modern homophobia developed in India during the colonial period.
2010
Islam and Homosexuality
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In 2002 I began a long and lonely journey, daring to visit some of the darkest corners of the taboo that permeates the consciousness of that unlikely character: the gay or lesbian Muslim.
2010
Christians Seeing Red: An Evangelical Perspective
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To many in my faith, I’m a walking contradiction. I’m a Southern-bred evangelical Christian pastor and a “gay ally” (as straight advocates for the gay community are so awkwardly called).
2010
Does It Really Work?
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Can we scare criminals into being good? A look into a new attempt at crime prevention.
2010
The Machiavellian Dilemma
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Has the Obama presidency failed? No, resistance to social and political change
is not a sign of failure—it’s inevitable, and can be overcome.
2010
Immigration: Don’t Let “Reform” Be an Excuse for Increased Repression
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. . . it relies on the idea of providing temporary worker visas to lower-skilled immigrants who are apparently expected to send their money home, providing American farmers, agribusiness, and other employers with a source of cheap labor that can depress the wages of other laborers.
2007
Why Torture Continues
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The American media has largely acquiesced to the Bush Administration’s strategy in reporting on the war: if American human rights violations get reported at all, they are quickly forgotten. Yet, the strong efforts by the Bush Administration to retain torture as a standard procedure in dealing with anyone it considers a terrorist or “enemy combatant” indicates a commitment to continue using torture for as long as the government can get away with it.
2002
The House of Inspection
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LONG AGO A PRISON WAS DESIGNED, the Panopticon. Prisoners would be isolated in separate cells that were organized like a stack of rings around a central tower. By special devices, the inspector in the tower would be able to see each prisoner but the prisoners would not be able to see the inspector. The prisoners could never be certain whether they were being watched or nor. This combination of isolation and the sense of being observed was to lead to moral reflection and rehabilitation. Versions of the Panopticon were constructed from time to time; the most uncompromising was the experimental women’s prison at A–.
2001
Zero Tolerance
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There is a growing sense in American life that politics has become corrupt. Those traditional public spheres in which people could exchange ideas, debate, and shape the conditions that structured their everyday lives increasingly appear to have little relevance or political importance. Within the increasing corporatization of everyday life, market values replace social values and people appear more and more willing to re treat into the safe, privatized enclaves of the family, religion, and consumption. The result is not only silence and indifference, but the terrible price paid in what Zygmunt Bauman calls the “hard currency of human suffering.”
2000
A War Against Boys?
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By now, you’ve probably heard there’s a “war against boys” in America. The latest heavily-hyped right-wing fusillade against feminism, led by Christina Hoff Sommers’s new book of that title, claims that men are now the second sex and that boys–not girls–are the ones who are in serious trouble, the “victims” of “misguided” feminist efforts to protect and promote girls’ development. They counsel anguished parents to “rescue” or “protect” boys–not from feminists but from a definition of masculinity that is harmful to boys, girls, and other living things.
1999
Israeli Feminism: The Impact of Women’s and Gender Studies on Jewish Studies
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In Israel, where the rabbinate together with the army give patriarchy a stranglehold on civil society, the potential impact of the feminist study of Judaism is of far more than personal significance. Nevertheless, it is only recently that the isolated efforts of a few scholars working in different institutions have begun coming together to form a vibrant and distinctive Israeli branch of feminist Jewish women’s studies, bringing a breath of fresh air and activism to a field dominated by conservative Judaic studies faculties and yeshivas. This in itself is one of the most important messages to emanate from the conference on “The Impact of Women’s and Gender Studies on Jewish Studies” held in Jerusalem in June 1999.