Religion Dispatches
…Attorney General, smarting from some religious pushback against his rip-the-kids-away-from-their-moms approach to asylum seekers, would resort to biblical proof texting. That’s always a rogue’s move, and it’s never been truer that even the Devil can quote Scripture for his own purposes. I have just three questions for Mr. Sessions: In Ft. Wayne, you said that God ordains the laws for the sake of “order.” Has there been anything even remotely order…
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…out that evangelical Protestant churches aren’t in quite the same kind of free-fall that Catholics and mainliners are experiencing. That’s true enough. It’s also true that evangelicals pick up more church “switchers” than they lose, so apparently they’re doing something right in attracting new members. But if the “too liberal” thesis were still workable, we’d probably see the mainline churches emptying, and social attitudes shifting right. What w…
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…n part. Zeitlin’s characterization of Louisiana is not uncommon, not for a newcomer and not for a native. It’s a variation on the whole laissez les bon temps rouler routine, with every country Cajun and Creole queen living every day like it’s Mardi Gras. It’s also part of the national and international fascination with Louisiana’s disaster streak. Had 1,836 people (1,577 in Louisiana) not died during Hurricane Katrina and had the population of New…
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…es. The Message: Washington is corrupt and I’m the savior. The Medium: Sort-of-kind-of-maybe appealing to younger people. Candidates always say we need a reformation, unless they want to be kind to the incumbent. Thus Paul recites his mild variation on the usual rote declamation: “It’s time for a new way, a new set of ideas…and above all it’s time for a new president.” We’re invited to “Join the movement.” The latter notion worked so well for cand…
Read More…non and Culture, the publication of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, rights-grievance is always the soupe du jour. Here, more than most venues, conservative writers routinely insist that they are besieged and mistreated, watching helplessly as their rights are trampled. This week, managing editor Andrew Walker posted a piece that demands to be quoted at some length: Those of us who believe that marriage is the exclusive, unaltera…
Read More…arge body of relevant, widely available, scientifically sound, scholarly research. The research surveyed for this Court shows that some of the contraceptive drugs have been classified as carcinogens, and that each of the contraceptive drugs and devices have been shown to significantly increase risks of other serious health conditions, including HIV, stroke and heart attack. Just as with claims that abortion causes breast cancer, that simply isn’t…
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…at the Supreme Court will necessarily get this one right. Indeed, many anti-equality writers are cautioning the Court not to repeat the mistake of Roe vs. Wade, when (so they say) judicial fiat ended a public conversation and created a bitter backlash. Yet however much it may disturb those of us on the more separationist end of the spectrum, this moment is a moral one, and this institution is the venue for it. And even the drag is part of the ritu…
Read MoreOn Wednesday, various media outlets trumpeted the news that science has come up with an answer to the age-old question, “Which came first: the chicken or the egg?” In response, PZ Myers over at Pharyngula went apoplectic. The problem? Well, the research says nothing about which came first. All it says is that scientists isolated a protein in chicken ovaries that binds with calcium and is linked to shell formation. But in other animals, a differen…
Read More…Park here and here, I argued that, despite repeated promises that the park-as-job-creation-project will not discriminate in hiring, it remains hard to understand how, given their expressed views, they can keep this promise. Ken Ham, founder and CEO of the organization that will run the park, believes that two Christians with different interpretations of Genesis, speaking at the same convention is an intolerable level of “compromise”; He asserts t…
Read More…in Kentucky. AIG’s defense of Freshwater, in which no mention of the cross-burning incident is made, is predictable: Good historical science is based on correct knowledge of the past. The Bible provides this knowledge as it is the history book of the universe; any ideas about the past apart from the Bible are simply based on the opinion of man who was not there. Georgia Purdom, the writer of the piece, concludes by demonstrating AIG’s contempt fo…
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