…te on his blog that he felt that Custer or Columbus would have been a more appropriate code name for bin Laden, and that the use of Geronimo was just another example of how “We’ve been reduced to caricatures as mascots and entertainment in sports and media.” In fact, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee held hearings recently on American Indians and racist stereotypes, and one of the first items of business was a discussion of why this particular…
…to get his joke about Jews and Chinese food. But Chernoff received rousing applause when he declared, “God is moving among our people” and “Yeshua is the only way.” Coach Mac appeared on stage to speak about what sparked his interest in Jewish-Christian reconciliation, and to introduce material from his new book, Two Minute Warning, where McCartney calls reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles “the biblical pathway to worldwide revival.” In a dra…
By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston
…ere is a nagging question I ask my conservative evangelical friends: what happens when abortion is illegal? What happens when everyone is a Christian on the Supreme Court? What happens when you bring back prayer in schools? What happens when these wretched amoral leaders and avaricious politicians pray? When all of those things come “back,” they say, Jesus has returned for a 1000-year reign; or that it’s what Christians need to do. I tell them tha…
…ill host the World Congress of Families summit in May. Netherlands: Mobile app designed to help LGBT migrants & refugees Dutch officials have created a mobile app to help LGBT migrants get information on refugee rights and resources and Dutch asylum procedures. Liberia: Essay on ‘tacit tolerance’ and backlash to public pressure for LGBT equality Baba Sillah, a Liberian post-graduate student in the Graduate School of Global Studies at Sophia Univer…
…e New York Review of Books, advocates age restrictions or flat-out bans on app use. Both of these approaches presume a fundamental weakness in human agency. State intervention is the only way, these writers argue, to protect us against ourselves. Well, sort of. These kinds of provisions don’t protect agency so much as they determine an acceptable degree to which it will be lost. They don’t address the deeper social forces and habits of mind that e…
…ce generally, the interactive reshaping of spiritual life mobile computing applications—apps—are taking up the creative slack in inviting believers, seekers, and non-believers of all stripes into what Meyers refers to as the “adventurous and always unpredictable exploration of God’s strange and surprising ways with the world.” Scholars and religion journalists are just beginning to address the impact of religious apps on the shaping of formal and…
…cultural conservatism in the United States. The foundation of this source code (the motherlode of the code, as it were) is Catholic natural law moral philosophy. Natural law is the 800-year-old Thomist tradition that absorbs (from revelation and scripture) and communicates (into public discourse and legal practice) a quite specific understanding of the human individual as the summit of God’s creation. First Things has hosted some of the most impo…
…ke away that free will, except for those who have the capacity to hack the code and reprogram the car. We normally think of robots as almost pure code, yet the scene last week when Graystone orders the Zoebot to rip off her arm raises some interesting stakes in this. It seems to me that people may be treating the Cylons differently depending on what mix of code and law they believe governs their behavior. And of course, those of you who study reli…
…toning under a portion of the oil-rich Southeast Asian country’s new penal code based on Islamic Shariah law that is slated to take effect next year. Gambian lawmakers last month approved a measure that would impose a life sentence upon anyone found guilty of “aggravated homosexuality.” The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights is among the groups that have urged Chadian President Idriss Déby to reject a proposed amendment to his c…
…,” she adds. The lawyers have referred to Article 98 of the Egyptian Penal Code as justification for their demands of imprisoning the author. In an open statement to the Egyptian General Prosecutor, they called for the author to be tried for “contempt of the Christian religion and verbal abuse of Copts.” Naguib Gobrail, one of the lawyers and President of the Egyptian Human Rights Federation, has argued that “Muslims attack Christians in as many w…
