Religion Dispatches
…nt of Catholic Democrats. “Catholics are all too keenly aware of both the damage of sexual abuse on victims—sometimes life threatening—as well as the connection between sexual abuse and the abuse of power.” It’s an irony that I’m sure will be lost on the Trump campaign—as well as his “Catholic” supporters….
Read More
…aph, When Christians Were Jews. The only two New Testament books that even use the title “Christian” (Acts 11:26; 26:28; 1 Peter 4:16) present the term as a label applied by outsiders. This is not to deny that the shooter’s proof-texts use anti-Jewish language, but to acknowledge that their authors fit into a broad Jewish matrix and their texts originally addressed specific groups of Jews rather than all Jews. The apostle Paul spoke to the Thessal…
Read More
…ify concepts that have always seemed culturally implicit,” like who should use the men’s room and who should use the woman’s room. Part of this, writes Green, is a backlash against the move toward legalizing same-sex marriage, which destablilized a long-established gender binary, with anxieties first expressing themselves as requests for exemptions from participating in same-sex marriage ceremonies and more recently in the right of states to contr…
Read More…mend that adolescent patients be counseled proactively about contraceptive use as part of routine exams, particularly about emergency contraceptives and long-acting reversible contraception (LARC), because of their potential to dramatically reduce teen pregnancy. The AAP “encourage[s] routine counseling and advance emergency-contraception prescription as one part of a public health strategy to reduce teen pregnancy,” while ACOG now recommends “LAR…
Read More
…ts its religious justifications are similar: it would ban gay marriage because homosexuality is a “sin”; it would ban abortion, even in the case of rape, because, as Mourdock claims to know, life is a gift from God. Predictably, some commentators are recycling the tired talking point that “the left doesn’t get religion” to discredit those outraged by Mourdock’s comments. On the right, New York Times columnnist Ross Douthat argues that the media on…
Read More
…onal churches, such as Mars Hill Church and those affiliated with Acts 29, use means that otherwise may be deemed suspect, for the ultimate end of reaching and saving “the lost”? Thus when Driscoll and his church were accused of gaming the system to catapult Real Marriage to best-seller status, Mars Hill’s Justin Dean justified the campaign as follows: Mars Hill has made marketing investments for book releases and sermon series, along with album r…
Read More…rientation, gender identity, disability or geography. We support religious freedom. Religious freedom means that each individual has the right to exercise their own beliefs and the right not to have others’ beliefs forced upon them. We believe no employer has the right to deny the women who work for them basic health care. Individuals must have the right to accept or reject the principles of their own faith without legal restrictions. No single…
Read More…obscured by reckless, sloppy and somewhat McCarthyite behavior” by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.) Lee Fang, the Center for American Progress blogger who broke the story, has more details on the funding this week and told me that the Chamber’s use of foreign funding for political attack ads “is unprecedented.” Anything else? I asked Wehner, aside from going after that well-known friend of Jesus, the Chamber of Commerce? His replies incl…
Read More
…Jefferson himself was interesting and challenging. Your book reminded me that Jefferson was one of those great Enlightenment polymaths. He saw himself as equipped to do anything, any challenge, whether it was archaeology or politics or editing the Gospels. Except freeing the slaves. He wasn’t up for that challenge. That’s something I realized only later, that he is excused as a man of his time when we talk of the ownership and enslavement of men,…
Read More
…three separate times, pairing it with the terms human nature, rule of law, freedom, and peace, thus making it a major theme. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” No doubt, Stephen Miller’s language was intended, generally speaking, to invoke these lo…
Read More