Religion Dispatches
…cal histories of these animals, hunting, and sport. She observes that in a number of apocryphal stories, lions and Christians (usually women) are thrown into the arena for the entertainment of the Roman Empire. Hunting, executions, and fights used animals and human others for the sake of gruesome entertainment. In many of these stories, the animals refuse to kill the martyr, thereby witnessing to their faith and innocence. But the games reinforced…
Read More…y helping anyone in need. You’ll notice that Shrum never says a word about service or ministry. It’s all holiness all the time. Unfortunately for churches like Shrum’s, holiness just isn’t very popular in our culture these days. What people want in spirituality is egalitarianism, an emphasis on the ways in which God welcomes, rather than rejects. It’s okay that Shrum or other conservative pastors might say “Sorry, we can’t offer that in our church…
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…k page, I think all this is dangerous. I think we have to stand up for the freedom of fiction writers to write what they want to write, no matter how offensive it might be to someone else. We must stand up for fiction as a place where transgressive behavior and ideas can be explored … internet campaigns to destroy authors accused of inappropriate subject matter or attitudes are dangerous to us all. In an email to the Guardian, Rice noted that she…
Read More…hristian lawyers couch their legal claims in the more palatable “religious freedom” argument, Christian legal education is explicitly designed to train lawyers to represent someone like Davis, a plaintiff who purports to make a religious freedom claim, but actually aims to litigate the very essence of authority. The first Christian law school in the United States, Oral Roberts University Law School (founded in 1986 and later absorbed into Regent U…
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…echnology, and culture, the report offers two insights–one about religious services, and one about the difficulties of studying etiquette through surveys. It’s “Generally Not OK,” But… One part of the Pew study asked respondents to gauge the appropriateness of using cellphones in various places, including whether it is “generally okay or not okay for people to use their cellphones…at church or [a] worship service.” A full 96% of those surveyed cho…
Read More…,” the use for which you have to pay what he demands on top of the cost of service. Tony’s “businesses” are very personal things, part of himself. And, thinking this way about public offices is precisely what defines “corruption” means. Flip the coin, and just as Kim Davis does not own the County clerkship, despite her mother having served in it before her, Kim’s private property, say, her body, does not belong to the state. The temptation is grea…
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…ere going to be ticketed—after having already promoted the Papal visit as “free and open” to the public on the conference website. As a result, some hotel rooms are being cancelled, people are angry, and shopkeepers are worried. It’s not the Philadelphia nativist riots of 1844, but hey… Don’t worry, if you’re coming to Philly and can’t get a ticket, this picture from my friends at Billy Penn shows just how close you can get to the altar—that dot i…
Read More…ual providers, but would “constrain institutional claims of conscience and free up willing physicians employed at religious hospitals to provide services.” Efforts to use state anti-discrimination laws have seen some preliminary sucess. Mercy Medical Center, a Catholic hospital in Northern California, recently relented and allowed a woman to have a tubal when the ACLU threatened to sue for sex discrimination under state law. For now, the ACLU of M…
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…es that requiring the sisters to notify the Department of Health and Human Services that it intends to opt-out of the contraceptive mandate, as allowed under the so-called accommodation provided by the Obama administration, is actually a “permission slip where we authorize the use of our religious health plan to offer services that violate our beliefs and waive our protections under federal civil rights laws. That’s why they need our signature.” W…
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…that the earning prospects for many jobs are so pitiful that unprecedented numbers of workers have simply stopped looking; it’s not that inflation-adjusted income for households headed by someone with only a high-school education have fallen by almost 20% since 2008; it’s not that low-income people are still often shut out of needed preventive health care services, even under Obamacare; and it’s not that people within America’s lumpenproletariat a…
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