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Pressure Grows on Obama to Reject Anti-LGBT Religious Exemption

…n. The legal scholars focused more on constitutional law and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in making the case that neither Free Exercise Clause nor RFRA require an exemption to preserve religious liberty. In addition to the religious organizations, today’s letter was signed by an array of civil rights and liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and the NAACP….

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2010: What Did We Believe In?

…c barrel, money rules our lives and guides our actions like no other force today. Unemployment, bailouts, national debt, foreclosures, bank regulation, layoffs, and entitlement programs—the list of economic concerns remains the same since the start of the financial crisis in 2008, but the upcoming social, cultural, and political battles over how best to deal with these concerns cuts straight to the heart of national identity—a point made dramatica…

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Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

…new groups of people. You also make it more available to commodification. Today, a studio like MNDFL can insist that it’s a non-religious space, even as it draws on religious traditions. “The secularization is explicitly designed to make [mindfulness] more marketable,” said Jeff Wilson, a Buddhism scholar at Renison University College in Canada and the author of Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Cultur…

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Religious Freedom Gets Hollywood Treatment

…cided with the Congress’ hurried alteration to the Constitution to expland freedom of belief to include freedom of conscience, Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to the cristero stronghold of Guanajuato state, and a papal flyover (in the presidential helicopter) around the Cristo Rey monument near León. (Mexicans go to the polls on July 1.) The U.S. also stands in need of the film’s message right now, according to Barroso: “The movie is about conscience. No o…

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The Tragedy of Religious Freedom

…agency that refused to place children with a lesbian couple. The challenge today is how to distinguish between, on the one hand, attempts to license discrimination that come cloaked in the language of religious freedom and, on the other hand, genuine disagreements about how people and institutions of vastly different convictions can live together in a pluralistic society. Simply to deny (or, for that matter, to grant) every claim for a religious e…

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Eyes on the Prize, Rainbow People! A Post-DOMA Challenge

…How can we not see how Black people might now feel that these passports to freedom have been hijacked by others, even as they were being canceled or compromised for their original beneficiaries? In the very same week and by the very same Court. I don’t have the actual talking points, but here is my simple plea. We should use this occasion to celebrate, modestly, today’s breakthroughs for LGBT people even as we publicly lament the losses suffered b…

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Southern Baptists Embrace Minorities, but Not Gays

Southern Baptists are feeling pretty good about themselves today. Eleven years after the denomination apologized to African-Americans for supporting segregation and slavery, it elected a black man as its first vice president of the convention—“the highest position yet held by an African-American” in the denomination, the New York Times notes. Fred Luter Jr. pastors a largely black church in New Orleans and is apparently an “overwhelming favorite…

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Pope Mum on LGBTs in Uganda; Church Defends Anti-Marriage-Equality Efforts in Australia; Cyprus Passes Civil Partnerships; Global LGBT Recap

…Establishment of the East African Community. Australia: Catholic Church in free-speech battle; official changes mind on marriage Catholic Archbishop Anthony Fisher is defending the Catholic Church’s freedom of speech in response to a complaint arguing that a recent pastoral letter sent home with Catholic high school students in opposition to marriage equality violated Tasmania’s strict anti-discrimination law. “Australia is party to treaties guara…

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Updated: My Work on Confederate Monuments Leaves This Christian Ethicist Distrustful of Calls for Reconciliation and Healing

…a battlefield and shaking hands. Reconciliation was won either by actively promoting white supremacy (“At least we both share this superiority together!”) or else not discussing such a divisive topic. It is for this reason that Frederick Douglass looked at this situation with trepidation: “So sure as the stars shine in the heavens, and the rivers run to the sea, so sure will the white people North and South abandon their quarrels and become friend…

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Can the “Spiritual Left” Make the Change They Wish to See?

…blican (62% to 31%). But what kind of political activism does spirituality promote? The culture of American spirituality tends to emphasize civic action through emotional self-development. Spiritual practitioners argue that we can best change the world through changing ourselves. If we properly govern our own emotional responses, lowering negative emotion while cultivating positive emotion we make our country a better place, one interpersonal inte…

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