Religion Dispatches
…dismay turned to laughter when I saw immediately below Winters’ screed the code of conduct for comments on National Catholic Reporter. His post is a primer on violating NCR’s own rules for respectful conversation. Maybe someone at NCR can give him a much-needed tutorial. NCR Comment code: Be respectful. Do not attack the writer. Take on the idea, not the messenger. Use appropriate language. Avoid vulgarities and slurs. Keep to the point. Deliberat…
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…the norms of her Pashtun culture. Sharbat Gula is a Pashtun with a fierce code of respect, honor, and modesty. The notion that women and girls should not share space with a man without her or her parent’s consent is intertwined with the Pashtun code of conduct, as is the lack of direct eye contact between men and women. In 1984, as McCurry recounted to NPR, Sharbat Gula initially covered her face when he took her photo. It was her teacher who ins…
Read More…d-down and unflinching personhood bill yet: the bill would amend the legal code to treat fetuses as persons at all stages of biological development. So what happened? Well, there was opposition, of course. People got nervous about the things that generally make a lot of people nervous about giving legal rights to fertilized eggs. What about in vitro fertilization? What about ectopic pregnancies? What about the liability of medical providers? The b…
Read More…donesia’s conservative Aceh province has enacted a strict Islamic criminal code, local government officials said late on Friday, criminalizing adultery, homosexuality, and public displays of affection outside of a legally recognized relationship. Aceh is the only province in the Muslim-dominated country to adhere to sharia, Islamic law, which puts it at odds with other provinces where the vast majority of the population practices a moderate form o…
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…n of religious believers’ feelings has been enshrined in the Russian Civil Code for quite some time, but making it a criminal offense to insult the feelings of religious believers could bring with it much harsher penalties. The Russian web was abuzz with a lively discussion of this topic last fall, and as the initiative was recently passed, there is renewed interest in the Russian media and blogosphere. Аccording to the just passed redaction of ar…
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…al rule of law than the government does. [They] lay out a social and moral code that governs human interaction, and supplies a context for suffering and poverty, constructing a group identity through which followers can hope to secure their worldly needs, and find some certainty about the hereafter.” It follows that in such places, religion may be the only guiding principle, the only social, moral, even legal code to abide by. Somalia, for example…
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…attacks. “I call on The Gambia to fulfil its international obligations to promote and protect the human rights of all persons without discrimination, to repeal all provisions of the Criminal Code that criminalize relations between consenting adults and to put in place an immediate moratorium on arrests on the basis of such laws,” the High Commissioner said. Amnesty International also sounded the alarm on Gambia this week, highlighting the detenti…
Read More…atican, and the World Evangelical Alliance have worked together to issue a code for how Christians ought to evangelize. No word on how this code effects the use of Chick Tracts. A village in the Philippines celebrates its patron saint, John the Baptist, with a Mud People Festival. Reminds me of my weekend at Bonnaroo 2004. The Pope tweeted—from an iPad, no less. It’s all part of the Vatican’s new multimedia news portal, news.va. Biblical criticism…
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…eld said that “Gen. Boykin gave many in the field just the kind of warrior code they needed to fulfill their duties with moral passion.” In an extensive, and highly-documented, review of Mansfield’s Ten Tortured Words, Rodda, pointed out that the book was shot full of a series of historical errors and noted that “Mansfield makes David Barton, whose masterpiece of historical revisionism, Original Intent, is listed in the bibliography of Ten Torture…
Read More…, over the years I have logged in many an hour listening like some wartime code breaker to folks like James Dobson, Chuck Colson, etc. For years, I was a near fanatical listener to Hank “The Bible Answer Man” Hanegraaff of the Christian Research Institute, tuning in like clockwork to his show weekdays 7:00-8:00 p.m. on Washington DC’s WAVA 105.1. Still, as much as I appreciated (and occasionally even found inspiring) these programs’ message of sel…
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