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Holy Father, You’re Not Helping: The Problem with the Pope’s Plan to Consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary

…octrine of the Immaculate Conception, which holds that the Virgin Mary was free from Original Sin, is not a doctrine shared between the Catholic and Orthodox churches. In fact, it’s only been an official part of Catholic teaching since 1854. While the Eastern churches agree with Catholics that Mary was free from personal sin, the fact that the Eastern church has never accepted Augustine’s teaching on Original Sin means that the doctrine is superfl…

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As Hobby Lobby Heads to SCOTUS, Let’s Ditch Kosher Butcher Analogies

…about Hobby Lobby’s RFRA case, pointing out that “protecting the religious freedom of employers under RFRA presents a risk of imposing significant costs on employees.”  In any case, as Marty Lederman has explained, the Court has never recognized a religious freedom infringement claim by a for-profit entity: In their scores of briefs, the plaintiffs and their many amici fail to cite a single case, apart from the current contraception coverage litig…

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“Pregnancy is Not a Disease”: Birth of an Anti-Contraception Rallying Cry

…ting new people, and the “unitive” purpose of fostering love and closeness between a heterosexual married couple. It did so partly to correct a prevailing notion that any non-procreative sex was a sin—even, for example, sex between a married couple where one or both partners were infertile.) Yet even with all their emphasis on procreation, ancient theologians didn’t bring much rosy optimism to pregnancy and childbirth. To the contrary, many though…

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Is Proselytizing Ever Okay? Are We All Proselytizing All The Time?

…ating my religion,” you should feel free to tell them that their religious freedom ends where your own religious freedom and moral autonomy begin. The fundamental fact remains that you haven’t asked them to change their mind about anything; you’ve only asked them to leave you alone. If we want to have a functional pluralist society at all, we need people, broadly, to respect such boundaries. Stalking and harassment shouldn’t get a pass simply beca…

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Barack Obama, Pro-Life Hero

…g initiatives, conservative activists are finding they may apply religious freedom to any number of disparate issues. Apart from trivializing what ought to be a sacred liberal right, the widespread deployment of religious freedom arguments indicates a weak rhetorical posture. In each of the cases mentioned above, opponents of a particular piece of legislation embraced religious freedom only after other strategies failed to persuade. Such arguments…

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The Legacy of Bush, Gambler of Other People’s Fortunes, Is Still With Us

…fortunes that were never really his. There are rich analogies to be drawn between this wonderful little story and the immediate aftermath of the Bush era. Dostoevsky plays endlessly on the distinction between two kinds of money-lust: the sort of profit motive capitalism he thinks of as preeminently German, and the no-holds barred running of insane risk he sees as Russian to the core. The narrator tells us pretty clearly which form of madness he p…

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Everything Was Better When We Had God In Our Schools

…daughter during her recital. • March 11, 1908, Boston, Massachusetts. Elizabeth Bailey Hardee was shot to death by Sarah Chamberlain Weed at the Laurens School, a finishing school in Boston. Weed then turned the gun on herself and committed suicide. • April 15, 1908, Asheville, North Carolina. Dr. C.O. Swinney shot and fatally wounded his 16-year-old daughter Nellie in a reception room at Normal and Collegiate Institute. He then committed suicide…

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The Islamophobia Dodge of the Religious Freedom Pledge

…tian. What’s more, though, is how Christian candidates who’ve done much to promote a lack of religious freedom for other religions (e.g., Michele Bachmann’s worry that sharia will “usurp the Constitution” or Newt Gingrich’s calls to ban sharia law because it is “a comprehensive political, economic and religious movement that seeks to impose sharia—Islamic law—upon all aspects of global society”) or who have done little to tamp it down (e.g., Rick…

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What’s Islamophobia, and Do I Have It?

…d used today to bully, circumscribe, panic, or oppress.  Americans deserve better. Certainly bigotry is profoundly contrary to the values we aspire to. More pragmatically, Islamophobia is just plain bad for America. If we want to understand Islam, we should have accurate information—we wouldn’t want those who keep our country safe relying on people who have no idea what they’re talking about.   If we want to know how to navigate a tumultuous Musli…

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“We All We Got”: The Black Church As an Oasis in Baltimore’s Food Deserts

…nd their well-being at heart. With thousands of children going without the free or reduced lunches they depended on for a midday meal, it was a handful of churches and members of the community that would feed them breakfast and lunch. Meanwhile, national chain luxe-grocer Whole Foods would instead provide food for the National Guardsmen deployed by Republican Gov. Larry Hogan to “maintain order.” People of color in cities such as Baltimore or Flin…

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