Religion Dispatches
…rganic something that didn’t go through. I guess. Then halfway through my haircut, a South Asian man walks into the barbershop and sits two chairs down from me. He’s wearing a dark brown shalwar qameez, the clothes most commonly worn by people in the northwest of the Subcontinent. Thin, baggy trousers and a long, billowy shirt. It’s also 52°. Nobody notices. Not obviously, and not surreptitiously. Nobody looks up, raises eyes in surprise, or grins…
Read More…nt as part of the business. They similarly added a new Employee Policy and Customer Agreement stipulating that the Hitching Post will only perform unions ‘between one biological male and one biological female.’” Additionally, while the Hitching Post used to offer “wedding ceremonies of other faiths,” as Jeremy Hooper documented, the website was recently changed to offer only “a traditional Christian wedding ceremony.” Sarah Jones of Americans Unit…
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…ow to sue in small claims court. So many companies have made it clear that customer service is not a priority for them. Americans need to force them to rethink that position.” The fictional vampires of contemporary “paranormal romance” frequently appear threatening at first, but inevitably end up using their powers to protect mortals from other, more evil vampires. Self-identified, real-world vampires (strange as they might seem) may currently be…
Read More…ent years crafting. What does surprise me is this: Evidently a non-trivial number of readers of Beliefnet out there are offended by the word feminist. They don’t just disagree with certain tenets of feminism (which is far from monolithic, btw). They don’t just think, “Eh, that’s not really my thing, but whatevs, I like the site anyway and there are zillions of other people to read there. Oh, say! I think I’ll take the ‘What religion are you?’ quiz…
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…that came after saw the “American” as a new type of man. Indeed during the 1660s the colonists who now numbered in the many thousands were traumatized by both the collapse of the godly Republic in Commonwealth England, and the almost apocalyptic violence of the King Phillip’s War with the Wampanoag Indians, necessitating the construction of a new identity separate from that of their mother country. It’s around this time that men like Cotton Mathe…
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…of “rebuttals” they’re supposed to use in response to the various reasons customers might offer for not buying a product. For the salesperson armed with this flexible script, the human vulnerability of the single mother (one who expresses concern both for her children’s safety and for her precarious financial situation, for example) becomes a trigger for a set of prepared arguments that will ultimately result in a payment plan for a state-of-the-…
Read More…nt Erdogan pushed for a conviction for “insulting a public official”. The pair were facing 11 months in jail, but were spared based on good behaviour during the trial. They have been fined 7,000 Turkish lira (£1,830). Being gay has been legal in Turkey since 1858, but the country is still largely conservative on the issue, will no legal rights or protections for LGBT people. Many people – including a 13 year old boy – have faced legal trouble for…
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…honest person. In one familiar tale, which was included in Horatio Alger’s 1883 semi-fictionalized biography Abraham Lincoln: The Backwoods Boy, Lincoln walked a long way to return a petty sum to a customer who had been inadvertently defrauded in a store where Lincoln then worked. Despite his reputation, in his own day Lincoln was criticized by his opponents for lying. He could certainly spin the truth for political gains. The historian Richard H…
Read More…that came after saw the “American” as a new type of man. Indeed during the 1660s the colonists who now numbered in the many thousands were traumatized by both the collapse of the godly Republic in Commonwealth England, and the almost apocalyptic violence of the King Phillip’s War with the Wampanoag Indians, necessitating the construction of a new identity separate from that of their mother country. It’s around this time that men like Cotton Mathe…
Read More…argued in our amicus brief, co-authored with Muslim Advocates on behalf of 15 religious minority and civil rights groups. At the same time, I was surprised to see how much the Court’s opinion rested on its apparently rigorous commitment to religious neutrality, especially considering how the Court has dismissed such concerns in the past. In finding that Colorado had violated the requirement that the government be neutral towards religion, the Mas…
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