Religion Dispatches
…—a body politic. The next question was how to establish enduring forms and rules for running that body. The answer was a period of constitutional framing that served as the imperfect but as yet unrivaled launch of the American states and subsequent national union. Thus, in the time even before the beginning of the United States, it was not discipline or Christianity or narrow focus on the family that kept the Pilgrims strong: it was faith in each…
Read More…ealthy adults—those who are ill, pregnant, traveling, nursing a baby, menstruating, or elderly are excused from fasting. At the end of the month of Ramadan is Eid ul-Fitr, or “Festival of the Fast-Breaking.“ Like most holidays, it involves a lot of eating and sharing food (especially after a month of hunger!). The children get presents and those who can afford them wear new clothes with one old piece inside (socks, maybe) to keep them humble. It’s…
Read More
…ers believe that the courts are too easy on criminals. This appears to be true not just for capital-C crimes like murder and terrorism, but smaller crimes, including procedural, immigration, and drug-based felonies, few of which are violent. Nolan notes in his memoir that many of his prison companions were non-violent drug offenders and even elderly or infirm. He writes that “incarcerating people who aren’t a physical threat to society is expensiv…
Read More…Palin’s homage to both Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton, and absorbs stories about her breaking glass ceilings, and while purist complementarians like Phillips are concerned about Palin’s self-description as a “prolife feminist,” more mainstream conservative Christians know just how tepid that feminism is. In Palin’s case, it’s that of “Feminists for Life,” which appropriates the terminology of women’s liberation to temper the often stark mi…
Read More
…sert that some action is cruel, do I mean simply that I consider it to be cruel or do I mean that it is in fact cruel? Most of us, believers and nonbelievers, mean the latter. This position is called the objectivity of values and C.S. Lewis considered it, and not belief in God, to be the core of a religious orientation. The opposite position, that people invent values, that man is the measure of all things, in other words, is scarcely imaginable….
Read More
…ne of us was a Christian rock fan, we stuck out because we didn’t know the words and remained in our seats. Here’s another detail that struck me as being really strange: after the bands finished playing, there was a sermon (I remember it was about Princess Diana, which was odd because she had died a year before). During the sermon, the crowd was quiet and attentive—except for the girl in our section who was returning to her seat with a big plate o…
Read More…posing the compromise, with protests outside his office and television ads running against him in his home town. Nelson is in its crosshairs as well, with former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee traveling to Nebraska with the tea partiers to compare him to Judas. Clearly looking for religious cover, Casey issued a press release Friday touting the support of leaders like Sojourners’ Jim Wallis, Evangelicals for Social Action’s Ron Sider, and th…
Read More
…t behind that curtain and we sat on folding chairs, and I remember being struck by how small she was and how powerful her hands were, despite her size, and that she was wearing sandals in February in Washington. (Laughter.) We began to talk, and she told me that she knew that we had a shared conviction about adoption being vastly better as a choice for unplanned or unwanted babies. And she asked me—or more properly, she directed me—to work with he…
Read More
…down. You’re doing it to try to help an individual within it. And if you truly want to help the individuals within it, you try to bring them out and have support for them when they do leave. JM: Well you can’t put all the men in jail and get rid of the whole society. That’s the wrong approach. So you have to enforce what you can, which is what Utah is doing by targeting underage marriages, child abuse, and sexual abuse. Then, you provide resource…
Read More…merican citizens cannot sponsor their partners for citizenship. “The only true pro-family bill is one that keeps all families together,” said Rachel Tiven, executive director of the Immigration Equality Action Fund. That’s apparently not persuasive to the “pro-family” leaders who are holding their support for immigration reform hostage because they believe certain families are “unbiblical.” (The conservative evangelical bloc also supports provisi…
Read More