Religion Dispatches
…questions about what religious freedom and church-state separation mean. Many of the organizations and activists who are part of a coalition of church-state separation advocates have long done stellar work in raising awareness of encroachment of religion in politics and policy-making. Being able to keep the pressure on church-state separation issues during a campaign season will be the test of the movement’s political muscle. It might make Rick Sa…
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…ckly—after all, I’m comparing a country of 3 million to the world’s most dominant and domineering superpower—but the political paralysis shored up by faulty mechanisms of democracy is shared. While a different voting method like RCV would probably not have changed the outcome of that milestone 1990 election in Bosnia, the leading parties have benefited greatly from presidential winner-take-all elections since the war. Many of their candidates were…
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…c was applied in a set of rulings that, at least for a time, required that New York City schools opened to the community after-hours should make themselves available as rent-free houses of worship. If you treat religious worship as something different than, say, student theater workshops and local running clubs, the reasoning went, then you are discriminating against religion. The same line of thought informs the world of government-funded, faith-…
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…en his question and the condescending, irrelevant answers he received from Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, inspired RD to reach out to Hassan. To get him to tell his side of the story. “Upon entering,” Hassan told us, CNN let him know he’d have the chance to ask his “very important question in front of the entire world.” With a nervous quiver in his voice, Hassan went for it (video below): How would a Republican administration help bring peace to P…
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…theological harmony. Not only does this pull focus from issues of racism, misogyny, and Christian Nationalism, but it also helps to distance evangelicals from such analyses even further by laying the groundwork for excluding those with embarrassing views from being labeled as evangelicals in the first place. The limits of this kind of scholarly projection is perhaps most clearly seen in an intellectual quirk revealed by the collection’s chronolog…
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…on Juneteenth is, according to them, unprecedented. It’s too terrible to admit that millions of their compatriots can not only stomach the stench of concentration camps and strange fruit but can also inhale it deeply and be exhilarated by it. A more reasonable interpretation exists Tom Cotton, a Republican Senator from Arkansas, defended slave masters saying they thought it to be a “necessary evil.” Jeff Sessions, the former US Attorney General “j…
Read More…o a set of sermon-like addresses by Church leaders, not “conferring” in committee and deliberating policy, as is the case for other Protestant denominations. And although Church spokespeople stressed that Conference this year would be a routine affair, attentive Conference observers noticed signs that the Church is aware of what the media has called “the Mormon Moment:” an intensity of public attention driven largely by the presidential campaigns…
Read More…real question is twofold: “What do scientists say, when they are handed a microphone and placed on a lighted stage in the public square? And how does that compare with what one might find in the scientific journals?” This question may be more difficult than the first, but it’s more urgent. Because it often happens that scientists, like so many priests and other religious leaders, use their hard-earned authority unwisely. They go just a little out…
Read More…turned straight.” Even the researchers call their conclusions “overly optimistic.” “These results do not prove that categorical change in sexual orientation is possible for everyone or anyone, but rather that meaningful shifts along a continuum that constitute real changes appear possible for some. The results do not prove that no one is harmed by the attempt to change, but rather that the attempt does not appear to be harmful on average or inher…
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…ible.” (emphasis mine) Well, okay, that’s two. But as anyone who reads the New York Times style section, you have to have three instances of something for it to be a trend. Wait. What’s this? From Ina May Gaskin, earth-mama midwife and not-Roman-Catholic hippie commune cofounder, in an excerpt from her March 2011 book, Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta: [P]regnancy is not an illness in need of treatment, and nature’s design of women is not cons…
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