Religion Dispatches
…are moral issues. His sense of economic morality, though, forged somewhere between focus groups and Ayn Rand, is very different from the one most Americans share. Obama could have taken up this claim, and articulated a different economic-moral vision, one in which the top wage-earners pay their share, and in which health care is not predicated on the right insurance bet. This could have been a worthwhile ethical exchange, undermining the too-neat…
Read More
…ive minutes on the agenda of their November 2021 meeting to discuss what’s promoted as the most life-changing process for the Catholic community worldwide since Vatican II. There is a deep disconnect here between rhetoric and reality. Many bishops, especially the most conservative, are simply ignoring or, it is rumored, dissing the whole thing, perhaps considering it more of Francis’ folly. Others are mounting middling efforts. Still others are gi…
Read More
…We are Jewish Jerusalemites—residents by choice of a battered city, a city used and abused, ransacked time and again first by foreign conquerors and now by its own politicians. We cannot recognize our city in the sentimental abstraction you call by its name. Our Jerusalem is concrete, its hills covered with limestone houses and pine trees; its streets lined with synagogues, mosques, and churches. Your Jerusalem is an ideal, an object of prayers an…
Read More
…same Torah and commentaries, study the same Talmud, live by the same legal codes, and adhere to the same basic belief system. Yes, the haredim have a very narrow reading of these sources but it’s a safe bet that they can cite chapter and verse to support their views—often more adroitly than their modern counterparts. In his Mishneh Torah (Code of Law), Maimonides explicitly advocated the position that women should stay mostly in their homes. The k…
Read More…e Republican Party, which has been a flawed but “serviceable” vehicle for “promoting causes at the center of Catholic social concern in the United States,” is about to be hijacked by one Donald J. Trump. Their list of concerns about Trump are now familiar, especially to readers of the National Review: Trump is “unfit to be president of the United States,” he’s vulgar, he engages in no-holds-barred demagoguery, he “promised to order U.S. military p…
Read More
…y as practiced: slavery was not heritable (the children of slaves are born free, because, as Suleiman pointed out, the Qur’an assumes all persons are born free); that Muslims could not be enslaved (creating a tribal identity that transcended existing tribes); and that the offspring of slaves would be treated exactly as one’s own children. Slaves themselves should be fed, and clothed, and housed, at a standard commensurate with their owner’s wealth…
Read More
…state and the tyranny of the majority.” [16] “Countries and Territories,” Freedom House, 2023. [17] Agustina Giraudy, Democrats and Autocrats: Pathways of Subnational Undemocratic Regime Continuity within Democratic Countries (Oxford University Press, 2015). [18] Paul Rexton Kan, The Global Challenge of Militias and Paramilitary Violence (Palgrave McMillan, 2019), 8. According to Army War College Professor Paul Rexton Kan, “collective self-defens…
Read More
…an affirmatively anti-LGBT-rights position and intervene to make religious-freedom or free-speech arguments on behalf of the defendants in LGBT discrimination cases brought under state laws. Which brings us to the final and overarching point of how to agitate for equality in Trump’s America: Get to Your Statehouses Even before Trump’s unlikely electoral victory, each new legislative session brought a cornucopia of anti-LGBT bills introduced in sta…
Read More…ersity. She was removed from the school’s counseling program last year because she refused to counsel homosexual clients. The university contended she violated school policy and the American Counseling Association code of ethics. That code, by the way, is clear about what is expected from counselors: Counselors do not condone or engage in discrimination based on age, culture, disability, ethnicity, race, religion/spirituality, gender, gender ident…
Read More…at the White House will be free of religious influence; in fact, a White House free of religious influence (conservative religious influence, that is) is something to be reviled, indeed provoking reverse peristalsis. Hence the new ecumenism found in manifestos like the Manhattan Declaration, which appears as a blueprint for the “religious freedom” wars, and in the opposition to the HHS contraception benefit requirement, and in opposition to the ju…
Read More