Religion Dispatches
…t makes atheism into one of the factors that we treat as identity —like race and sexuality. Unlike atheism, though, we assume that race and sexuality are not a matter of choice or conscious conviction. Bell’s marketplace uses language of social justice to protect the consumer in the choice—equally valid—between faith in God and faith in unfaith. His gamble might be risky in relation to God, but it is a sure thing in the marketplace….
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…e, fidelity, equality, and Justice.” Precept fifteen declares that the KTM promote democratic freedoms: expression, conscience, and religion. Precept sixteen states that Knights need to understand “how others get close to God.” Credo sixteen extols the virtue of patriotism. Number nineteen advises humility and nobility, while twenty-two announces that no woman should fear a Knight, but, rather, should feel protected by him. Twenty-nine reiterates…
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…llywood Censored. The code they designed became the Motion Picture Conduct Code, popularly know as the Hays Code after it was adopted by William Hays, a Presbyterian elder who was hired by the major studios to help clean up the industry’s image after it was rocked by a series of scandals. The code, says Black, “was a fascinating combination of Catholic theology, conservative politics and pop psychology—an amalgam that would control the content of…
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…cultural conservatism in the United States. The foundation of this source code (the motherlode of the code, as it were) is Catholic natural law moral philosophy. Natural law is the 800-year-old Thomist tradition that absorbs (from revelation and scripture) and communicates (into public discourse and legal practice) a quite specific understanding of the human individual as the summit of God’s creation. First Things has hosted some of the most impo…
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…og that he felt that Custer or Columbus would have been a more appropriate code name for bin Laden, and that the use of Geronimo was just another example of how “We’ve been reduced to caricatures as mascots and entertainment in sports and media.” In fact, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee held hearings recently on American Indians and racist stereotypes, and one of the first items of business was a discussion of why this particular code name wa…
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…consistently (and insistently) throughout was the need for reconciliation between gentiles and “believing Jews.” The Messianic Jewish movement focuses on the conversion of Jews to Christianity, yet it also encourages Jews to maintain their cultural and religious identities, including their observance of Mosaic laws. You could see some evidence of this impulse in the audience at Folsom Field: the Israeli folk dancers, the shofar blowers, the men (…
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…ek, I found myself thinking about Zoe in relation to Lawrence Lessig’s Law/Code distinction. Lessig uses the example of speeding. You can make it against the law to speed, and we have the free choice to violate the law and face the consequences. You can program the car so that it can not exceed the speed limit and you take away that free will, except for those who have the capacity to hack the code and reprogram the car. We normally think of robot…
Read More…avid Blight tells the story of the first Memorial Day, celebrated by newly freed blacks in Charleston, South Carolina memorializing dead Union troops. In Joplin, Missouri, residents mourned those lost in the tornado. The Department of Homeland Security has ended a post-9/11 registration program that required Arab and Muslim men to register with the government, but not before tangling many Muslim immigrants up in legal proceedings. The Muslim Broth…
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…nders” and people living with HIV/AIDS. The law sparked a fresh round of house-to-house searches and arrests. Nigeria: Challenges of living under ‘Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act’ The Nigerian Tribune features a story on the challenges facing the country’s LGBT community: Nigeria’s Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act, of 2013, which took effect in January 2014, made a bad situation much worse for the already subdued Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and…
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…and foundations across the US and Europe that are politically aligned and use their influence and resources to agitate for a free market fundamentalism devoid of government regulation. Amongst its members (past and present): Charles G. Koch of Koch Industries (one of the American Right’s most important mega donors), Thomas A. Roe (founder of right-wing bill mill, State Policy Network), and Edwin J. Feulner, the former president and co-founder of…
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