Religion Dispatches
…theological dividing line between good and evil, but also legitimate political fodder because they say it is a source of his collectivist, even Marxist, worldview. And it demonstrates his lack of commitment to the “quintessential American concept” of individual rights. Barton’s theory boils down to this: if it weren’t for revolution-supporting preachers and their doctrine of individual salvation, individual rights would not have been incorporated…
Read More
…country’s largest and most influential Orthodox organizations, the Rabbinical Council of America and the Orthodox Union, co-sponsored America’s first National Jewish Child Abuse Prevention Week. There’s nothing to suggest that sexual abuse is any more or less prevalent in the Orthodox community than anywhere else; but there are a number of peculiarities to Orthodox Jewish life that have made the reporting of abuse less common than in society at l…
Read More
…s in the U.S. for comparing their struggles to the struggles of women, African Americans, and GLBTQ citizens. On a global scale, however, secularism most certainly is an issue of civil rights and of human rights. And it’s important to note that the suppression of religious dissent online is being carried out not just by government authorities but also by private corporations. During the Innocence riots, for instance, Google restricted YouTube acc…
Read More
…e imposes a substantial burden on the free exercise of religion. Annex Medical lost its claim because the court concluded that the mandate does not impose a substantial burden on religious exercise and in the widely-publicized Hobby Lobby case, the court reached the same result. But other judges have reached the opposite conclusion. The Affordable Care Act generally imposes its insurance requirements on businesses that operate either as corporatio…
Read More
…dren equally.” Does He? Sure. But it’s certainly not reflective in evangelical teachings. Fix that. I can tell you that Christo-centric Instagram pages would be wise to not play the safe side by clinging to “Christ would want us to unite…” jargon. No. If unity is truly the end goal, it cannot come without first the acknowledgment of wrongdoing and the understanding that peace does not equal passivity. Choose a side. White churches such as Hillsong…
Read More
…gh I know that is maybe a controversial thing to say.” A survey of the musical landscape suggests otherwise. Though Baker and other artists are reluctant to identify as Christian artists or explicitly state their religious influences, the fingerprints of the Gospels on their works is undeniable. These are not the vague spiritual notions to which public figures are expected to nod in what some hold-outs insist is a Christian nation, they are radica…
Read More…s less horrible about the church than in the darkest days of the U.S. clerical sex abuse scandal, which had Boston at its epicenter. That’s a pretty low bar, but of course no one denies that Francis is a change for the better. As Jon O’Brien, head of Catholics for Choice, told The Guardian, Francis isn’t so much “a breath of fresh air as someone who has gone into the Vatican with an oxygen tank strapped to his back. He’s got the church out of a ve…
Read More…an equal and opposite reaction. What you sow you shall reap. No matter how carefully Mormon political consultants (some of them paid handsomely by Church members’ donations) tried to script a Mormon “grassroots” relationship to the Yes on 8 campaign, talking themselves and the members of their insular world into the legitimacy of these arrangements, it was naive and foolish to think that such a campaign could be conducted without significant conse…
Read More…uence. The upshot? The perception of increased religious influence on American society is just a cataclysm away. Religion’s saliency for political machinations, cultural inspiration, and social movements is a separate reality from the growing number of nones. Both need coverage. But the Gallup data raises questions that I’ve rarely seen addressed in recent years. What does faith look and feel like in flyover country? As a cub reporter, I wrote abo…
Read More…ong answer to a question I recently posed in The Forward – why should American Jews care about social justice? – the clip succinctly highlights a century of Jewish social justice concern. It’s compelling viewing. At the same time, both the clip and Bend The Arc’s new website situate this narrative in a Jewish immigrant experience that is hardly universal. Sephardic Jews, Jews from the former Soviet Union, Israelis living in America, Jews by choice…
Read More