Religion Dispatches
…e scenario for Israeli news consumers: Adelson only spoke to American reporters so they had an alternative to the Jerusalem Post’s puff piece. Worst-case scenario? The Israeli press doesn’t deem newsworthy what the owner of their largest newspaper and one of their nation’s biggest benefactors has to say about the most important issue in their country today….
Read More…on the Internet. Fiasco shares his decision to put the song on the Web for free in verse: “I’m not trying to profit off the prophet so this one’s for free.” He does this, ironically, even as his lyrics laud one of the most prominent black prosperity preachers, Creflo Dollar. Apparently, the two share a commitment to, as Lupe puts it, “no sex before you’re married,” if not a business ethic. And then there’s the fact that Kanye recorded three differ…
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…themselves as the true heirs of 1776, like their forefathers fighting for freedom against tyranny. This freedom included the right to own property, notably slaves…as Jefferson Davis put it, ‘Will you be slaves or will you be independent? Will you consent to be robbed of your property [or] strike bravely for liberty, property, honor, and life?’ Even for the majority of whites who owned no slaves, secession was a war for freedom because it alone co…
Read More…ouch says this: We at Christianity Today believe Christians are absolutely free to use marijuana (where legalized). And, when it comes to pot in our particular cultural context, we think it would be foolish to use that freedom. For the CT editors, the moral quality of marijuana use seems to depend entirely upon the “cultural context” in which it occurs. And since our particular context is not conducive to marijuana use, marijuana use would be “foo…
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…ny not only affects the aforementioned bottom line considerations of major news outlets, but also limits the imaginations of those who fail to look at it critically. And if the politics of America’s White evangelicals and other authoritarian Christians over the last few election cycles aren’t enough to get The New York Times or The Atlantic to question the conflation of “Christian” with “good,” or to grasp that authoritarian Christians cannot be r…
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Along with freedom of religion, freedom of the press stands as one of the five fundamental freedoms in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. But what is the free press, as an institution, supposed to do? Theorists of democracy generally put forth the free press as a cornerstone of civil society. Media outlets inform readers on matters of public interest, sometimes exposing malfeasance and corruption in business or government. They also prov…
Read More…reaks the supremely extraordinary Doctor. And the immediate result of this new, spectacular presence is not good, not good at all. Craig begins to fear that this odd new presence, by virtue of his wit, his charm, his downright oddness, will take Sophie away from him, either romantically (Sophie makes eyes at the new lodger more than a few times) or geographically (after the Doctor encourages her to become an animal rescue volunteer in a faraway la…
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…ating my religion,” you should feel free to tell them that their religious freedom ends where your own religious freedom and moral autonomy begin. The fundamental fact remains that you haven’t asked them to change their mind about anything; you’ve only asked them to leave you alone. If we want to have a functional pluralist society at all, we need people, broadly, to respect such boundaries. Stalking and harassment shouldn’t get a pass simply beca…
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…s many historians oversimplify by identifying Calvinism as the Ursprung of free market capitalism, Keddie more precisely singles out Arminianism, the deviation from orthodox Calvinism that reserved some room for human effort in the work of salvation. He pinpoints the crucial contribution of Hugo Grotius, whom the Dutch government locked up for his Arminian heresy, in laying the legal groundwork for unrestricted pursuit of private gain and the expl…
Read More…Public Integrity, the purpose of the company was to create Israel’s first “Free Export Processing Zone,” intended to promote business enterprise there. Contemporaneous news reports signaled the ideological heart of his efforts was to bring American-style conservatism to “socialist Israel:” “Israel is a country that was founded on statism, socialism and collectivism,” said David Yerushalmi, chairman and chief executive officer of the IEDC, which is…
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