Religion Dispatches
…are moral issues. His sense of economic morality, though, forged somewhere between focus groups and Ayn Rand, is very different from the one most Americans share. Obama could have taken up this claim, and articulated a different economic-moral vision, one in which the top wage-earners pay their share, and in which health care is not predicated on the right insurance bet. This could have been a worthwhile ethical exchange, undermining the too-neat…
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…ive minutes on the agenda of their November 2021 meeting to discuss what’s promoted as the most life-changing process for the Catholic community worldwide since Vatican II. There is a deep disconnect here between rhetoric and reality. Many bishops, especially the most conservative, are simply ignoring or, it is rumored, dissing the whole thing, perhaps considering it more of Francis’ folly. Others are mounting middling efforts. Still others are gi…
Read More…r difference within the precincts of our hearts and minds. But the tension between our mainstream self-presentation—the blonde Ken-doll phenotype many ascribe to ethnic Mormons (descended from 19th-century English and Scandinavian emigrants), our conservative politics, the carefully crafted and highly standardized language Mormons learn to use to both protect our beliefs and describe them to non-Mormons—and the radical innovativeness of Mormon bel…
Read More…?) And who were similarly silent when the party tried to capitalize on the coded racism of the anti-Obama forces in 2012 or upend the Affordable Care Act, even though the Catholic Church has been advocating for universal health care since Model Ts were on the road. And it’s even funnier that those who helped put Bush and Cheney in office and watched as they led the nation into endless, unwinnable wars, and justified torture to prevent an ever-pres…
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…chers and school districts to use “supplemental textbooks,” which are just code words for creationist and pro-intelligent design materials. Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University, co-founder of Louisiana Citizens for Science and one of the creationist movement’s most damning critics, said she believes the complaints are merely a tactic to get disclaimers (Warning: These books teach evolution!) added to the tex…
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…ked to Silvan Shalom, Israel’s foreign minister, that the new museum would promote tolerance “just as building health clubs promoted health.” This was not the first time that the Wiesenthal Center and the LA Museum of Tolerance formulated its own foreign policy; and in doing so implied that they were speaking for the American Jewish community at large. The center endorsed enthusiastically the Bush administration’s Iraq War, and in 2006 it dubbed V…
Read More…ntended she violated school policy and the American Counseling Association code of ethics. That code, by the way, is clear about what is expected from counselors: Counselors do not condone or engage in discrimination based on age, culture, disability, ethnicity, race, religion/spirituality, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status/partnership, language preference, socioeconomic status, or any basis proscribed by law. Counselors…
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…des, but exploded in 2003 with the publication of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code which, more than anything, showcases Brown’s muddled if provocative incorporation of the Gnostic worldview into the novel. Fans of The Da Vinci Code don’t need to go out and purchase Robinson’s translation, they can simply read the Gnostic texts online at the Gnosis Archive. Or, if they’re interested in other early contenders for New Testament inclusion—the Gospel of P…
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…politics is almost irresistible.” Indeed, he succumbs, dividing the world between good liberals and “tacky” conservatives, the distinguished and the sophomoric. When confronted by evidence that these categories are not so hard and fast as his inner social scientist would like, he falls back on a rhetoric that constructs a reasonable middle by dismissing all to its left and its right as paranoid. For Randy, the center always holds. But the center…
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…shrouded in secrecy, came into the spotlight after Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code hit the New York Times bestseller list. The novel suggested that the women in Opus Dei are “forced to clean the men’s residence halls for no pay,” and remarked upon the broad subjugation of women in the order. And while the novel is fictional, the alleged “misconceptions” that arose in the fallout of the media attention surrounding The DaVinci Code provided much of the…
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