Religion Dispatches
…urning delicately constructed foreign policy and difficult questions of strategy and policy, in the name of some kind of stand for freedom? That is too easy an excuse.…
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…ounded but still living world. A CNN story on the use of Romans 13 that focuses on its use to spread Nazism focuses on the opposition to the violent interpretation of it by famous theologians of the time. It concludes: “Jeff Sessions may also want to consider that his invocation of Romans 13 might inadvertently backfire. If the political opponents of the administration start to read Karl Barth, they may, in fact, become more, not less, likely to s…
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…mber to file a complaint against Ellis—which the Starr administration then used as a pretext to open a freewheeling investigation. Ellis added, “They are exaggerating the charges to the point where they don’t even believe it.” (Neither the faculty member nor her lawyer responded to requests for comment. Furthermore, Baylor would not say whether the school had received permission from the woman to release the charges.) In a speech at the American A…
Read More…el Lavers. The petition — which an anonymous person posted on Tuesday — accuses Brewster of promoting “an LGBT agenda inconsistent with the Christian cultural values and tradition of the Dominican Republic.” It specifically criticizes Brewster and his husband, Bob Satawake, for visiting a school. The petition also notes the two men “supported” last week’s official launch of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce’s latest international af…
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…in the context of a specific interpersonal relationship. However, when you use conservative coded language like “lifestyle” to describe the lives of a particular category or class of people, you are engaging in hate speech, you are perpetuating a rhetoric of fear, even when you surround such rhetoric with words like “love” and “compassion.” You can think you “love” me personally all you want, and you may enjoy my winning personality endlessly. We…
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…world of the jellyfish from very different vantage points, though not because he is a scientist and I am a theorist of things divine. Rather, because he sees the jellyfish as something that drinks from the fountain of youth and I see it as a sign of some kind of magic. But is the gulf between us really so deep? In his book The Constant Fire: Beyond the Religion vs. Science Debate (University of California Press, 2009), the astrophysicist Adam Fra…
Read More…tion 18 of the Constitution of Mississippi already protects as sacred “the free enjoyment of all religious sentiments and the different modes of worship.” Senate Bill 2681 is unnecessary to protect freedom of belief and worship in Mississippi, and potentially quite harmful. The professors are Ira Lupu and Robert Tuttle of George Washington University, Carlos A. Ball of Rutgers University, Sarah Barringer of the University of Pennsylvania, Dougla…
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…force that crushes the dreams of small business owners, the relationships between individuals and doctors, the rights of parents, and the freedom of religious believers. At the same time, he spoke of “millions of courageous conservatives” and “born again Christians” whose votes could restore an idealized constitutionalism and drive the big-government bureaucrats out of the American temple. Part of my goal in Superchurch is to help us better under…
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…ed by Christianity and U.S. foreign policy. There are many examples of the use of dubious archaeological evidence to advance narratives of racial, religious, and national superiority, and all too frequently, they have been marshaled in an effort to justify policies of conquest. In a speech in 1811, New York Governor DeWitt Clinton argued that the complex burial mounds found throughout North America were built not by American Indians, but by member…
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…hrase goes; but which, in fact, draws our attention to the profound divide between that logic which is “actuarially sound” and that logic by which, as the past few weeks have emphasized, a sizeable percentage of Americans use to make sense of their lives. The “misperception” Allstate sought to correct was that, as an insurer, they might raise charges or restrict coverage on customers born under certain signs. Regardless of the actuarial logic, thi…
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