Religion Dispatches
…ns them the place better than others who make different choices. So, it is better for not better than. I mean, do what makes you better for yourself, but do not confuse it with something that makes you better than another self; which is istikbar. The story of Satan goes like this: when the prototype (or first) human, Adam, was created out of an atom of dust (tin, pronounced “teen”) the unseen creatures were ordered to bow to him. There was a reaso…
Read More…raph the ceremony, etc.). And that’s probably not an accident; if I were a betting woman, I’d bet heavily that a pro-religious-exemption think tank or law firm, like the Becket Fund, had come up with this plan and recruited a plaintiff to set it in motion. The involvement of the local politicians mentioned in the story is likely strategic as well: Talking Points Memo quotes an “anti-gay” state lawmaker who says he supports the baker’s right to not…
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…emptions are not constitutionally required. People are fond of saying that freedom isn’t free, but nor is it absolute. And thinking in constitutional absolutes is killing Americans. Literally. The claim that the Second Amendment protects a sacred and unlimited right is a legal narrative recently invented, deliberately advanced, and grossly manipulated by the NRA—and it’s killing Americans. The Supreme Court’s political manipulation of the constitu…
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…es: The prohibition also violates the free exercise of religion. Under the Free Exercise Clause, laws are closely scrutinized by courts when they discriminate against religion or when they substantially burden religious exercise and other constitutional rights are also at stake… When the IRS threatens to revoke a church’s tax-exempt status for a pastor’s sermon from the pulpit, it is expressly discriminating against religious speech. Such direct d…
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…iberal professors in academia” use the word in a negative way. The phrase “free enterprise” is to be used in its place. 5. McCarthy, Great American Hero: Led by McLeroy, board members voted to require students to learn about “communist infiltration” in the 1950s in an attempt to absolve Joseph McCarthy for his Cold War Communist witch hunts. McLeroy asserted inaccurately that McCarthy has been “vindicated by history.” 6. Expunge the (Brown) Social…
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…ced simply to a code for broader sets of values for particular groups, because the use of Jesus—even a Jesus envisioned as white—destabilized white supremacy. When asked a question about Jesus’ race, Martin Luther King responded that Jesus was “no less significant because he was white,” suggesting both how his own unspoken and even unconscious imagery arose from the history related in this book, but also the fact that his actions which arose from…
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…place, when a few imaginative, inspired people dared to declare solidarity between natives and foreigners, free born and slaves, men and women, through a ceremony and a creed. It is the story of that first, unbelievable creed. *** 1. “Die Frauen in die neutestamentliche Schriften,” Theologische Quartalschrift 90 (1909): 321–51. 2. Heinrich Weinel, Paulus. Der Mensch und Sein Werk (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1904), 212–15. 3. Larry Hur…
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…t played the same role in maintaining nearly 30 years of Republican hegemony that the labor movement once played in maintaining Democratic hegemony. The religious right is now in some considerable disarray, though by no means disabled. What better time, and what better way, for religious progressives to help spur a big turn in our politics than to lend some help right now in restoring the central role of a progressive labor movement in advancing s…
Read More…s, the plaintiffs have argued that the separation of the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses by a semicolon requires that the two clauses be interpreted, for these purposes, identically. (Filmmaker Drew Emery calls the upcoming Supreme Court case “the world’s most closely watched semicolonoscopy.”) In Conestoga, though, the Third Circuit rejected those arguments. “We are not persuaded that the use of a semi-colon means that each clause of the Fi…
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…health services that the Vatican considers unlawful, such as contraception use for preventing HIV and AIDS. Her decades-long tenure on the board of Catholics for Choice—first as a member and later, a member emerita—cost her employment at Catholic institutions, including an endowed chair at the University of San Diego. She understood that the theological was indeed political. Ruether located reproductive politics as the site of modern-day tensions…
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