Religion Dispatches
…in light of the preference of the choosing subject is a basic condition of freedom. King saw freedom as a moral right. Thus, King was on the side of freedom. However, freedom can be complex. King would have likely challenged the idea of subjectivity as it relates to the freedom of choice of all subjects involved, forcing us to sit with the possible tensions of our choices and one’s moral right to choose. In the end I think King would have upheld w…
Read More…past in a way that sounded like a sweeping statement about Asian Buddhism today. I apologize for that. One way I could have expressed it: in my part of Asia, when I was growing up, Dharma could often be found in high concentrations, but only in small areas. Perhaps the opposite is true in America today. 3. I think the most important point in this discussion is that we have to hold teachers to a different bar than normal practitioners. For normal…
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…of oversimplified bullet points: An unpleasant aftertaste: As noted above, today’s labor movement is tremendously diverse, both ethnically and racially. Women and people of color run some of the biggest unions. But many religious leaders of a certain age are more likely to recall the older exclusionary craft unionism. They remember cranky George Meany and his ever-present cigar. They remember the building trades—Meany’s crowd—raining both bricks a…
Read More…nt guarantees equal protection to fertilized eggs. At his press conference today, Santorum alluded to reproduction and procreation by praising the family as “the moral enterprise that is America,” and by specifically thanking the 19 Kids and Counting Duggars for campaigning for him. It might have sounded like a standard political homage to wholesome family life, but to anyone who knows Santorum’s views, it was an homage to uber-fertility. As Kathr…
Read More…explored in a piece for the Daily Beast in June), particularly his role in promoting homeschooling, Lizza gives short shrift to Rushdoony, who is not only a “prominent Dominionist,” as Lizza describes him, but the founder of Christian Reconstructionism and Titus’ inspiration. And, as Julie Ingersoll has detailed on numerous occasions, “Christian Reconstructionist founder Rousas John Rushudoony is often called the father of the Christian homeschool…
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…a Mesa, California and grew out of the Jesus Movement of the 60s and 70s. “Today,” says Carly Fox of Calvary Chapel Watch, “the vast majority of Calvary Chapels are far-right, authoritarian, evangelical churches that embrace white supremacist thinking, Christian Nationalism, queerphobia, and male supremacy.” They operate under what Smith called the “Moses Model,” whereby a church is governed by a senior pastor who is accountable only to God. Spear…
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…lgamation of white supremacy and American Christianity that lives among us today. These unsettling connections among white supremacy, white Christianity and support for the former president are not confined to the extremists who attacked the Capitol. There is a strong correlation between voting for Trump in the 2020 election and median scores on the Racism Index—a composite measure of attitudes about systemic racism I developed in my recent book,…
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…bullies within the fringe of his own party?” she said. “What we have seen today is the Turnbull government have overturned the decisions that their own government took just a matter of months ago.” The Greens’ sexuality spokesman, Senator Robert Simms, said it was “clear that Malcolm Turnbull has thrown LGBTI young people under the bus today by bowing to the rightwing backbench bullies and stripping back the Safe Schools program”. Meanwhile, the…
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…hey have a child, which provides them with greater financial stability and freedom. Women of color, on average, earn significantly less than white women, and many cannot afford to pay for quality contraception. The IUD, for example, is considered the most effective contraception available on the market today, but because it costs between $500 to $1000 only 6% of black women have used IUDs compared with 78% who have used birth control pills. Provid…
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…ized around categories and silos that don’t reflect how people really live today or the work we have to do understand the world we live in. To change this, you have to be in conversation with the right kind of people. You have to make a commitment to talk interdisciplinarily. You can’t be with people who will retreat to the fallback position of their discipline. You have to invite people to the table who are willing to ask questions from new persp…
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