Religion Dispatches
…es that matter most to Jewish Americans,” reads the new section of the web site of the Super PAC Ready for Hillary, Jewish Americans Ready for Hillary! (Don’t forget the exclamation point to indicate your ultimate readiness). “In every corner of this country, members of the Jewish American community are signing up to say that they are Ready for Hillary!” (Again.) According to a press release from Clinton’s effusive Jewish supporters, Rachel Schnei…
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…to the space as “sacred,” and suggest people will make “pilgrimage” to the site. The language is more than mere museum visitor attending a public institution. The space is hallowed ground. We secular people may not believe we are fetishists, bowing to divine sculptures for help in fertility and war, but our responses at memorials and museums show that we at least continue to be functional animists. There is an animating force at work within the ma…
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…ople into the classroom to speak about their faiths, and by visiting local sites that are important to faith communities—all the while focused on keeping to an academic, “outsider” (and not devotional, “insider”) perspective. To those of who report on religion and its role in society and culture, it seems clear that a solid education should include the study of religion(s). And yet there’s some confusion about what it means to teach religion as a…
Read More…ther chose to walk out of the classroom. FERPA requirements prevent school officials from releasing information about the incident, however, Mehta suggests this was essentially a misunderstanding rather than a teacher persecuting Christians for their faith. But I suspect there’s more going on here. This scene of a Christian student leading a class in protest against a supposedly anti-Christian educator isn’t an isolated event. A week earlier, a pr…
Read More…ing the ICEJ event to a “troubling trend” of Christian control of Old City sites. Haaretz reports that the group has put up posters in Jerusalem saying that “attempts to portray the vigil as harmless are deliberate acts of deception on the part of missionaries who seek to attract Jews and strengthen the church’s hold on holy sites in the Old City.” To be clear, ICEJ’s promotional materials do not explicitly invite Jews to join the prayer vigil, bu…
Read More…ns who are pressing for Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount: Tensions at the site have been escalating as some Israeli lawmakers have stepped up provocations to reverse the long-standing ban on Jewish prayer there, once considered a fringe position but now a growing rallying cry on the Israeli right. No Israeli prime minister since the war of June 1967, when the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem began — including stalwarts Menachem Begin, Ariel S…
Read More…s will come to nothing. The non-partisan GovTrack, an open government data site, puts the likelihood of HR 153 becoming a law at zero percent. This bill will never come to a vote, probably, disappearing into the Ways and Means committee never to be heard from again. The question is: why aren’t Republicans supporting it? Religious conservatives are rallying around religious liberty issues, including the rights of churches to get involved in politic…
Read More…an exorcism by Archbishop Paul S. Coakley. Oklahoma City has also been the site of an ongoing controversy as The Satanic Temple (a different Satanic group) has campaigned to erect a monument to Satan on the grounds of the state capital to complement the current monument of the Ten Commandments. After Michael Tate Reed II rammed his car into the Ten Commandments monument on October 24, shattering it, the Satanic Temple released a statement condemni…
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…me a long time and I hope that my regret for the long journey is clearly communicated in the book. I am sorry it took me so long to put it all together. It’s like being in a movie where someone is trying to crack a safe and there’s six numbers and you have to get all six numbers right for the safe to open. I think that’s what’s happened for me. Finally, all six numbers came up and I was able to open the safe and I could see this in a new way. Tha…
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…of real estate in the world. The decades-long arrangement under which the site was administered by a special trust in Jordan is coming unglued under unrelenting pressure by ultra-orthodox Jews who want to see a Third Temple erected there. Leading Israeli politicians pander to these pressures, making their own provocative statements. Worse, these same politicians backed versions of a proposed nationality law—hugely controversial in Israel and amon…
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