Religion Dispatches
…or you can go to hell. There’s nothing nice about that. But then there’s nothing nice about the absurd, reactionary, vicious and apparently successful class war the rich and powerful are waging on the rest of the nation, either….
Read MoreThe incoming class of congressional freshmen includes, Jaime Herrera (R-WA), the first homeschooled member ever, and Daniel Webster (R-FL) a homeschooling activist about whom I’ve written here and here. In a press release celebrating the “coming of age” of homeschooling, The Old Schoolhouse Magazine poses the question: “Is Homeschooling Good for America?” which they answer by touting the culturally transformative character of the homeschooling mo…
Read More…d their proxies, no County funds are being directed into the defense of Proposition 8. But with recent polling showing that a majority of Latino Catholics now support marriage equality (as we’ve reported here at RD), one wonders whether the working-class (and deeply unemployed) Latino majority of Imperial County is setting the moral agenda or whether they’re being played by a highly motivated set of outsiders with no longterm interest in the welfa…
Read More…rday that current Ghanaian law does not criminalize gays and lesbians as a class of people, but rather “unnatural carnal acts.” She added that the prosecution of people suspected of being gay would require a change in Ghana’s laws. Just over a week after being cited as favoring decriminalization of homosexuality, Lamptey added that she was “misquoted and therefore misrepresented.” Ms. Lamptey, a recent appointment by President John Atta Mills to h…
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…as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position—no more than I could present intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. BTW, in saying that I now consider the case for theism to be a fraud, I do not mean to charge that the people making that case are frauds who aim to fool us with claims they know to be empty. No, theistic philosophers and apologists are almost pai…
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…bless while saving all of their real love for their buddies in the rentier class. Having one’s job “terminated” is very different from being struck by disease or death or natural disaster; religious leaders ought to respect the difference and not press a course of quiescence or acceptance in the face of blatant injustice. Word: A sanctified space for people struggling with work-related issues should not be just one thing and should not operate in…
Read More…e who claimed that at her public school she was made to feel like a second-class citizen for being straight. It seemed like a ludicrous assertion, so I asked filmmaker Joe Fox who told me that those teens were brought out to read their scripted statements, then declared off limits for follow-up questions. Question 1 also makes it clear that religion was a motivator for many people on the pro-equality side as well, documenting campaign events organ…
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…before groups ranging from his Church’s most wealthy elites to the middle-class Knights of Columbus, urging them to reconsider their position on immigration reform. His strategy: to proclaim (as summarized by the Catholic News Agency) “Immigration helps recover the Christian Origins of America.” Really? Is the Archbishop of Los Angeles suggesting that immigrants will bring about some sort of Christian Establishment in the United States? Is he…
Read More…ut McDonnell’s use of sources would be inadequate even in an undergraduate class. For example, he cites statistical evidence as the basis for his arguments, but checking his references we find that his source is not a scholarly report but an un-footnoted reference by a Christian Reconstructionist pastor, Ray Sutton, in a little book written for Gary North’s “Biblical Blueprint” series. The book is written at a level appropriate for a church Bible…
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…Methodist Bishop Nolan Harmon justify enslavement to his Methodist Polity class by saying that “somebody had to do the work.” (The economic structure of the South depended on farming and 19th-century farming required vast human labor.) Nolan Harmon was a signatory of the infamous letter from eight Southern white clergy saying Birmingham demonstrations were “unwise and untimely,” which prompted Martin Luther King Jr. to write his “Letter from a Bi…
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