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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…ve also argued that Taiwanese society has its roots in Confucianism, which promotes a strong adherence to traditional family values, and of course, producing offspring. They argue that the fundamental concept of marriage should be between a man and a woman, otherwise it would be “very confusing for children.” The South China Post said the court ruling in Taiwan “has reverberated across Asia, but the fight for equality is not over yet in a region w…
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…s a pair) has produced new attention in LDS communities to how those dress code boundaries are enforced and who bears the brunt of the enforcement. Beginning in November, the BYU-Idaho testing center (responsible for administering academic examinations for many classes, especially large General Education courses) started interpreting and enforcing the school’s dress and grooming standards as a ban on “skinny jeans.” A flyer was posted by universit…
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…
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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…
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…ink a life-or-death question like that is unimportant, but using the legal code as a vehicle for a slogan is totally important and a good use of their time. 3. I would like them to say whether they think that families who’ve used assisted reproduction—like in vitro fertilization—should not have the children they have. And if that’s not what they think, then how can they explain why they’re supporting this legislation? 4. I would like them to say t…
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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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