Religion Dispatches
…indulgences, to borrow a pre-Protestant term. And those are reserved for “the new chosen,” as the Fellowship calls America’s elite, all those now preparing for cozy afterlives to their public lives in penthouses and beach houses and a ranch down in Crawford. +++ Read more about the economy and free market fundamentalism: In Markets We Trust, Peter Laarman Faith-Based Bailout, Louis A. Ruprecht…
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…press ambivalence—desiring to protect free speech but outraged at how this freedom is often used. But aside from lamenting the decision or its results, what is left to do? How may we oppose hatred without sliding into a comfortable position of mere tolerance? How do we uphold the freedom of speech while recognizing that it does not always lead to greater freedom for the marginalized? If we are to oppose hatred and move beyond the mere toleration o…
Read More…r as it seeks to win votes in upcoming elections for the country’s lower house. India’s fledgling Aam Aadmi Party is betting that championing the rights of women and minorities and fighting against corruption will be winning issues for voters as the party seeks to elect its first lawmakers in the nation’s parliament. Aam Aadmi was established only 18 months ago but won 28 of the 70 seats in the Delhi Legislative Assembly in 2013 – making them the…
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…same Torah and commentaries, study the same Talmud, live by the same legal codes, and adhere to the same basic belief system. Yes, the haredim have a very narrow reading of these sources but it’s a safe bet that they can cite chapter and verse to support their views—often more adroitly than their modern counterparts. In his Mishneh Torah (Code of Law), Maimonides explicitly advocated the position that women should stay mostly in their homes. The k…
Read More…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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…We are Jewish Jerusalemites—residents by choice of a battered city, a city used and abused, ransacked time and again first by foreign conquerors and now by its own politicians. We cannot recognize our city in the sentimental abstraction you call by its name. Our Jerusalem is concrete, its hills covered with limestone houses and pine trees; its streets lined with synagogues, mosques, and churches. Your Jerusalem is an ideal, an object of prayers an…
Read More…e Republican Party, which has been a flawed but “serviceable” vehicle for “promoting causes at the center of Catholic social concern in the United States,” is about to be hijacked by one Donald J. Trump. Their list of concerns about Trump are now familiar, especially to readers of the National Review: Trump is “unfit to be president of the United States,” he’s vulgar, he engages in no-holds-barred demagoguery, he “promised to order U.S. military p…
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…rming, and human cloning.” It also allows teachers 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: T…
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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…
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…y as practiced: slavery was not heritable (the children of slaves are born free, because, as Suleiman pointed out, the Qur’an assumes all persons are born free); that Muslims could not be enslaved (creating a tribal identity that transcended existing tribes); and that the offspring of slaves would be treated exactly as one’s own children. Slaves themselves should be fed, and clothed, and housed, at a standard commensurate with their owner’s wealth…
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