Religion Dispatches
…Christian society and a form of religious politics that will make biblical code the law of the United States. These activists are quite serious about bringing Christian politics into power. Bray said that it is possible, under the right conditions, for a Christian revolution to sweep across the United States and bring in its wake Constitutional changes that would allow for biblical law to be the basis of social legislation. Failing that, Bray envi…
Read More…at weird was, in fact, code for Mormon, and that Obama and team planned to use the word “weird” as a dog-whistle to stoke voters’ antipathies towards Mormonism in 2012. The news set off a wave of cringes among Mormon politicos as well. Because Mormons do recognize “weird” as a word that sticks to us in the American imagination. In 1995, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley declared in an interview with Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes, “We are not a…
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…e uneven evolution of our thinking about these things, and the language we use to describe them, casts fresh light on how we use other shorthand terms in this complex and fraught dimension of public life. The term “faith-based,” for example, we use more or less synonymously with “religious” and as substitutes for such terms as “ecumenical” and “interfaith.” It has become a warm and fuzzy term used for glossing over religious differences, both for…
Read More…types of contraceptives, there was no reason that other employers couldn’t use the same logic to refuse to provide all contraception. Her prediction came true on Tuesday when the court ordered the reconsideration of several other suits that had been rejected by lower courts which objected to the provision of all contraceptives, surprising many who figured the conservative Catholic justices would at least wait until the ink was dry on the Hobby Lob…
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…ing intimate expression, but sexuality in a cultic context. Detestable Because it is Foreign, or Foreign Because it is Detestable? Now, so far, it is unclear whether a toevah is detestable because it is foreign, or foreign because it is detestable. This question is resolved elsewhere in the Bible, because Israelites are not the only ones with toevot. There are several examples of things which are toevah for Egyptians but perfectly acceptable for I…
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…t to Mass.” Moreover, it’s not even clear that the same substance is being used. While contemporary researchers use synthetic psilocybin, for someone like Sabina, the mushroom itself is essential, and cannot be separated from its chemical makeup. She referred to the mushrooms as “the saint children.” My point is not to say that Richards and other researchers use such substances inauthentically, as if they’re merely appropriating for their own purp…
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…Spirit guided his pronouncements. “The Church cannot change her answer because this answer is true because the Catholic Church, instituted by Christ could not have so wrongly erred during all those centuries of its history,” they wrote. As one of the conservative theologians famously asked one of the female members of the commission, what would happen to “the millions we have sent to hell” for using contraception if the teaching were suddenly chan…
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…r research, you need to have the term locked down. How does our day-to-day use of “spirituality” differ from the definition you use in the lab? Spirituality comes for many people within their religious tradition, and for many other people spirituality comes outside their religious tradition. There’s a very broad range of spiritual experiences. The piece that I focus on in The Spiritual Child is a direct relationship with a higher power, whether th…
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…of a norm violation. Consider “Why did he kick his friend in the shin?” We use the very same processes that we normally use to make sense of human behavior to now make sense of this violation of human behavior. Blaming is in a sense a socially grown mechanism to increase or decrease the degree of responding to violations, depending on (as research has shown consistently) whether the violations were intentional or not, whether they were based on ju…
Read More…ht use it for something else. If you give someone a gift card for a steakhouse, then if they use it, they will certainly use it for steak, because it’s designated to be used for steak. And if you have a moral problem with eating steak, then you shouldn’t be required by the government to pay your employees with a gift card for a steak house. Likewise employers shouldn’t be required by the government to pay their workers with a form of compensation…
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