…ording to the just passed redaction of article 148 of the Russian Criminal Code, “public acts expressing manifest disrespect for society and carried out with the goal of insulting the feelings of religious believers” could bring fines of up to 300,000 rubles (over $9000) or up to a year of imprisonment, or fines of up to 500,000 rubles (over $15,000)—or up to three years in prison if the act is carried out in a place of worship or a place otherwis…
…t continues to retain Section 377A of the Penal Code, which criminalizes sex between men. The law is sandwiched between codes that ban sex with corpses (Section 377) and sex with animals (Section 377B) in the Penal Code, indication of official attitudes towards homosexuality in the wealthy city-state. Convictions under 377A allow for two-year prison terms. In a bid to placate both liberals and conservatives, the government has said that it will ne…
By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston
…have gone through fact checking and legal review, and tens of thousands of xeroxed documents from The Family’s archive at the Billy Graham Center. Ah, sour grapes! Yes, I got ’em. Not so much because Randy radically misrepresented my arguments in the Post, where I can’t respond, while offering far more nuanced arguments of his own only in this smaller and more scholarly roundtable, but because such a dichotomy represents exactly the scholarly/popu…
…t religious opposition has helped stall progress toward equality: Marriage between same-sex couples is not legally recognized in Taiwan, although 3.5 to 5 percent or at least 1.2 million of the 23.4 million people in Taiwan identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. A draft bill that would legalize same-sex marriage cleared a first reading in the Legislative Yuan last year and was sent to the legislature’s Judiciary and Organic…
…fect on our everyday approach to the Bible’s stories? Will play with the text in the form of a game make us more likely to see the biblical text itself as a game, or at least as alterable? Of course, Jewish interpreters have been reading the Bible this way for thousands of years. Midrash itself is a sort of biblical play and can be both enjoyable and theologically profound. But fundamentalists of all monotheist stripes are much less enamored of in…
…campaign later tried to amend the statement to replace the phrase “entire existence” with “sad, miserable existence.”] In graduate school, I concentrated in political philosophy and ethics, where I was rightly trained to be wary of arguments that tried to score rhetorical points by deploying a Nazi analogy, a move sometimes called reductio ad Hitlerum in philosophical circles. This tactic is a logical fallacy, typically taking the form of a slippe…
…his space. What amazes are the many and varied ways some Catholics try to explain and excuse a statement that is perfectly consistent with current institutional church teaching. The welcome surprise is the strength and breadth of the negative reaction. This chapter of church history is not yet a wrap. Stay tuned: straw breaks camel’s back. Conservative Catholics have every right to claim that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which i…
…n act of dehumanization. The problem here is that there is almost no space between explanation and justification—on either side. One is thus being forced to choose sides and express empathy only for one. Any gesture of empathy for innocents on the other side quickly evokes the accusation of moral equivalency at the very least—self-hatred and treason at most. So it must be said, decades of humiliation, domination, and the deaths of many men, women…
…t we may not have done so quickly. Kaitlin Foley: If and when there is a next step, it might be to connect the dots between the fictional and virtual origins of Taqwacore. I can’t say Mike Knight’s The Taqwacores was a genesis for me about Islam but it was an affirmation that self-publishing was a chance to throw out the rule book and create my own. I could play around with social media to find people and ask why a fictional punk scene fascinates…
…‘bawa’i,’ or remainders. Back from when most Spaniards spoke Arabic. 19. FOX News “FOX News” by Summer Putman Because what else would they talk about? 20. Band practice The Ottomans invented military parades, and attached military bands (with drums over horns) to battle formations, to boost troop morale and freak out whoever was being attacked. They attacked often, which was not cool. But pretty soon everyone who was anyone was doing it, and then…
