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Catholic Bishops Winning “Liberties,” Losing Humans

By Patricia Miller

…ting a whole new space for “religious liberty” so Catholics are ostensibly free to act out their Catholicism in public spaces. According to FiveThirtyEight, “religious liberty” has now replaced “gay marriage” in GOP talking points, up from none during the GOP debates in 2008 to 29 so far this year: Mentions of “religious,” “religious liberty” and “religious freedom” appeared more than ever in this year’s debates when referring to the rights of bus…

Zen and the Art of the Sex Scandal

By Gary Gach

…ivine commandment. In Buddhism, there’s no creator deity. Nor is there any central Buddhist institution, such as a Vatican. Rather, in establishing one of humanity’s first monastic orders, the Buddha set forth a matrix and process of conscious behavior (vinaya) based on actual conduct. As such, it’s thus not top-down but, rather, bottom-up. Different cultures put their own spin on the teachings (Dharma). Some schools have five central precepts; ot…

Creationism and Evolution are Competing ‘Myths’

By Kelly E. Hayes

…iverse governed by impersonal processes. Its model of the world does not encode the kinds of hierarchies between and among species that are central to the creationist narrative. Each narrative offers a divergent conception of time and human history and the forces that shape them. And each privileges a different method for obtaining knowledge about the world: either revelation or empiricism, and, by implication, a different set of specialists who c…

American Christmas (Shopping) and the Protestant Reformation

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ked out with a Christmas tree, Christmas lights, and a manger scene in the central Piazza, this curiously Protestant concern with images seems a bit, well, a bit out of place. The thing is, in Rome, Jesus isn’t in Christmas, at least not until the morning of the 25th. Manger scenes in Rome don’t have a Baby Jesus; the cradle is left empty until Christmas morning. So there’s no question of getting Jesus out, much less taking him out, of Christmas….

Way Beyond Atheism: God Does Not (Not) Exist

By Paul Wallace

…le bearing in mind its lessons. In fact, negative theology constitutes the central nervous system, if you will, of the entire Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas that Dawkins so happily and ignorantly mocks. In this work, Thomas employs analogical language in order to speak freely of God’s attributes without the possibility of confusing them with the attributes of, say, fire or kingship or love or being. Finally one may say that negative theology i…

The Tea Party are Sodomites

By Jay Michaelson

…e story of Sodom is in a biblical section where hospitality and ethics are central themes. Only one chapter earlier, Abraham had welcomed three men to his tent, and the text spends five verses on the details of the menu he prepares. (Indeed, after departing, these men “look toward Sodom,” suggesting they may be the same messengers—the Hebrew word malachim is less supernatural than “angels”—as appear in the next chapter.) Right after Abraham’s barg…

Talking Back to a Mormon Elder: Religion versus Reality

By Brent D. Beal

…hen there are Roy and Silo, two male Chinstrap penguins in New York City’s Central Park Zoo that successfully hatched an egg they’d been given. And so on. In the case of humans, it’s been around for thousands of years (if not longer). Homosexuality is a part of nature—a part of the world that God created (if you believe that God created it)—and by any definition of the word, it’s natural. Okay, I think, Elder Packer is old. He’s a product of a dif…

Immigration As A Progressive Game Changer—Without Evangelical Support

By Sarah Posner

…eligious right’s effort to reshape itself for the 21st century through the Freedom Federation. His central tenet of theo-politics: to “repudiate the spirit of Herod, the spirit of Sodom and Gomorrah, the spirit of Jezebel.” Rodriguez, like the Catholic bishops, opposes immigration reform with LGBT equality. But a bloc of House Democrats are opposed to letting that critical piece of justice fall away from comprehensive immigration reform. As Rep. J…

Burma Bans Time Magazine’s “Buddhist Terror” Issue

By Alan Senauke

…ured is still not clear. In March there were similar riots in Meikitla, in central Burma south of Mandalay, which left forty-four people dead and thousands of homes consumed in flames. Last year’s conflict in Burma’s western Rakhine state, also saw thousands of homes destroyed and roughly a hundred thousand people displaced—mostly Muslims—in ethnic violence between Buddhist Rakhines and Muslim Rohingyas. There has been violence on both sides. Rece…

On Guns and Religious Liberty, Ben Carson “Not an Authentic Adventist”

By Sarah Posner

…latter is faithful witness to God’s government and coming kingdom, not to promote the might of worldly empires. That would appear to be a religious worldview that would alarm some of Carson’s biggest fans. Hines hopes that Carson isn’t asked on the national stage to explain Adventist eschatology, which portrays the American government as one that will eventually, in league with the Catholic Church, persecute Adventists for their observance of the…