Religion Dispatches
…ce on sticking around for several more months (and presumably guaranteeing free and fair elections thereafter) is unacceptable. And once more unfortunately our president has missed the opportunity to make history. To assume that the people who have braved injury and death for days now will somehow accept that their dictator of 30 years will hand over power in seven months is insulting to their intelligence. Correcting himself a few hours later, Ob…
Read More…d be jailed. A HuffPo news item gives more detail, saying that a person is free to leave Islam without harassment, and should only be jailed if they preach to others that they should leave Islam. (I am relying on second-hand reports as Adhami has numerous lectures and there is no direct link to what the reporters are referring to). For a traditionalist scholar like Adhami, this statement is fairly important. He is moving the question of apostasy f…
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…Jesus who says “Welcome the stranger” and “I’ve come to set the prisoners free.” What’s your advice to people of color in white evangelical spaces? We have done two things for too long. One, we have centered white people in our conversations around race and power. We have placed at the center of the conversation the question of whether or not white people will accept the message. We have held back the reality of the impact of their public actions…
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…age-old struggles; we are blessed by a unique ability—indeed destiny—to be free of conflict, to be free of the past, to “believe in the same dream that says this is a country where anything’s possible.” Anything? Really? You can almost hear the pantheon of European Christian theologians groaning from their graves in disbelief. But, hey, this is the New World where the frontier has traditionally offered the eternal lure of new beginnings and…
Read More…data: 50 percent of white evangelicals say they believe capitalism and the free market are at odds with Christian values. According to the survey, white evangelicals are more likely to say the free market and Christian values are at odds than black Protestants, mainline Protestants, Catholics, and religiously unaffiliated Americans. On first glance that seems difficult to accept given white evangelicals’ overwhelming electoral support for the Repu…
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…ludes the following line (emphases mine): In reaffirming our heritage as a free nation, we must remember that America has always been a Christian nation. Time magazine’s transcript, meanwhile, reflects what the president actually said: In reaffirming our heritage as a free Nation, we must remember that America has always been a frontier nation. It’s entirely possible that the speech wasn’t deliberately edited; that Trump, who’s famous for ad-libbi…
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…ple. It’s what you can do for yourself and others. As it is, White evangelical Protestants have it both ways. A vote for apartheid free of consequence, free of guilt….
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…eedom that made democracy possible are the root of what makes reproductive freedom possible today. The rollback of religious freedom that the sponsors of the Virginia Statute warned us about is well underway. We can see it in the recent and likely future decisions of the Supreme Court, the damage done by the Trump administration, and in the theocratic agenda of the Christian Right, a movement that continues to grow in political power. But their da…
Read More…, not a religious rights issue, but it gets to one of the complications of free exercise rights. Some areas of law operate vertically, let’s say, since they’re mostly self-referential and one can acquire expertise in them without much reference to other areas of law. But religious rights work horizontally, as they come into interaction, and conflict, with many other categories of law. And it’s impossible to be expert in all types of law, even for…
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…mocracy” as the work of the 20th century, and that task continues unabated today. He warned that there was only one thing that really threatened to undo it: party-thinking. But these savage, wolfish parties alarm me. Owning no law but their own, more and more combative, less and less tolerant of the idea of ensemble and of equal brotherhood, the perfect equality of the States, the ever-overarching American ideas, it behooves you to convey yoursel…
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