Religion Dispatches
…ersonal, theistic sense referring to a transcendent God in heaven and some use it to refer to a pantheistic, immanent power that infuses all of nature? God-hating atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others of their narrow-minded ilk have made a killing tearing down a God worshiped by childlike, blind followers not rational enough to follow lock-step behind the true idols they worship: science and secularism. God-fe…
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…ding incident. Rather he said it was because of the Bible on his desk. Because he had refused to remove it, citing religious freedom under the First Amendment, he said he was being persecuted. Students organized a rally for him, bringing their Bibles to school in support. A Web site devoted to Freshwater’s cause is called www.bibleonthedesk.com. But Dennis said the issue was never about the Bible on the desk. And nowhere in the lawsuit’s initial c…
Read More…I do not care if there are gods or not.” Whether unconsciously or not, we use the term “religion” as a substitute for “theism” (belief in divinity). This is partly because Christianity, as the dominant religious system in the United States, normalizes a lot of its characteristics. Religion is not the same as “theism,” nor does it require an institutional affiliation. Often, students remark they are “spiritual” and not “religious,” because they th…
Read More…revious precedents that had been set, or the bishops’ long-term efforts to use conscience exemptions to beat back efforts to expand access to contraception. It was their off-the-cuff, emotional responses to the mandate, which they perceived as an attack (Winters accused the administration of “punch[ing] us Catholics in the nose” while Dionne wrote that “Obama threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus”) that made the original exemption po…
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…and whom Dreher credits for the title, has himself been caught vacillating between the two notions of tradition. Identifying which notion is operative at any given moment gives us a better grasp of the weaknesses of the argument. As Jeffrey Stout argues in Democracy and Tradition, Yet once the ambiguity of the term “tradition” is made plain, it becomes obvious that the debate over the new traditionalism is best construed not as a debate between tr…
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…ear. The Islamic State began in 2004 as al-Qaeda’s Iraq affiliate, not because its then-leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, discovered that female motorists populate America’s highways, but because America had just invaded Iraq. We can and must fight back against ISIL. We have a moral obligation, not to mention a national security obligation. But we must be careful in that response that we do not fall prey to ideas that have already failed before (and i…
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…uthority to “execute wrath on the wrongdoer.” He predicts that others will use the previous chapter to argue that Christians should never avenge themselves, “but leave it to the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’” Jeffress is right in reading Romans 12 as a moral instruction to individuals or communities of Christians, and chapter 13 as dealing with systems of government instead. But then he goes off…
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…t the visit and that Episcopal clergy who were present are livid about the use of violence to clear the space. https://twitter.com/DavidBrodyCBN/status/1267653579852185602?s=20 https://twitter.com/Franklin_Graham/status/1267820563679989762?s=20 Of course, more insidious than the direct praise of Trump’s show of Christian nationalist force, which came on the heels of his threat to use the military to restore order in the face of days of demonstrati…
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…ht. Teaching ID as science violated the Constitution, the court ruled, because ID promotes religion and the Establishment Clause requires that the government remain neutral on religious issues. If Richard Dawkins was right about evolution disproving God, then teaching evolution presumably would also violate the Constitution. He should temper his claims, especially given the limitations inherent in any effort to use science either to prove or to di…
Read More…on The, hyphen between Latter and day, which has a lower-case d) should be used on first reference. Since it’s impractical to use all those words every single time you might want to refer to the church headquartered at 50 North Temple in Salt Lake City, Utah, what’s approved for subsequent references? The abbreviation LDS is out, so “LDS church” is now verboten. Instead, “‘The Church’ or the ‘Church of Jesus Christ’ are encouraged. The ‘restored C…
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