Religion Dispatches
…ID, too. In hopes of sounding scientific, ID eschews the word “God” in its official work, opting for an unnamed “designer.” In the same way, Battain goes for the vague and unoffending “higher power.” I have long believed that ID is on its deathbed. It is a scientific non-starter and a theological travesty. It is intellectually infertile. But Brattin makes me think what will ultimately kill ID is its inability to be honest with itself and admit wha…
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…is religious beliefs from his previous and prospective roles as an elected official.” A Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty? The National Organization for Marriage, the anti-LGBT group that has pressed the argument that same-sex marriage amounts to religious persecution of Christians, put out a “marriage pledge,” which was subsequently signed by both Gingrich and Perry, in addition to Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, and Mitt Romney. The…
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It’s official: it is no longer acceptable to call the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the fourth largest religious institution in the United States, a church with 7 million members in the US and 14 million members around the world, a “cult.” That’s the message Newt Gingrich sent when he fired his newly-hired Iowa political director Craig Bergman after it was revealed that Bergman had proposed a national crusade against the “cult of M…
Read More…, have Islam in common, speaking very broadly. But only a very, very small number of those have engaged in acts of murderous violence. We could on this basis instead look for what, other than Islam, explains such instances of murderous violence, as these acts are not exclusive to Islam (in the 1990s, for example, the Bosnian genocide and the brutal Russian assault on Chechnya.) Instead, we stuck to the monocausal argument, trying to determine what…
Read More…people in All American Muslim are not real to him. According to the FFA website, the show “profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks.” The real Muslims, FFA maintains, are “Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.” Caton is a big fan of the shari’ah scare industry, citing Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer on his website. Following the Low…
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…dination mean, and how does it fit into the larger context of ordained and official ministries? For example, well over 90% of deacons serve within what the Roman Catholic Church sees as the sacramental framework of matrimony; this demands serious theological and pastoral reflection, as the Latin Church now experiences again a married clergy. To the questions raised in our current work, we suggest that—regardless of the Church’s position on ordaini…
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…our weekly Sunday lessons, our Especially for Youth camps, girls camp, our official church website, church publications, our instructions for 21 year-old female missionaries. It’s starting to feel like a founding principle of our religion. I’d love to see us . . . get back to the good stuff. This is not our good stuff.” Some Mormons emphasize the importance of obedience for obedience’s sake as a key principle. Others ask whether disproportionate a…
Read More…ley’s recent career, it seems clear that he sets out to uphold and expound official Catholic teaching but prefers—indeed, considers it his calling—to do so kindly, and not to unduly alienate anyone in the process. Amy Sullivan, who wrote about the Burke/O’Malley dustup for Time, recently speculated that O’Malley’s leadership of the Pro-Life Activities Committee would likely be characterized by a “less partisan approach.” Assuming this will be the…
Read More…gelicals and Catholics over this supposed “religious liberty” issue became official with the 2009 release of the Manhattan Declaration, hailed by its authors as a glorious “ecumenism” because evangelicals, Catholics, and even some Eastern Orthodox Christians joined hands in protecting their freedom from the scourges of LGBT rights, reproductive freedom, feminism, and secularism. At the time, a handful of Catholic bishops signed the document. Now t…
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…urch is, to some extent, a reflection of American values. He also posits a number of broad questions (maybe too broad) about how we define religion in America and about “legal and theoretical issues in the study of religion.” In the interest of objectivity, Urban employs a simultaneous “hermeneutics of respect and hermeneutics of suspicion”—meaning that he takes Scientology’s religious claims at face value while acknowledging its illegal practice…
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