Religion Dispatches
…hy am I doing this?’ I think of the conversation that took place in Cairo, Egypt, between an Egyptian Christian pastor who has been severely persecuted by Islam and a man named Lou Engle” (Engle is the theocracy-minded founder of The Call, a fundamentalist youth movement, who is leading a 40-day fast to pass Proposition 8.) “When Lou was in Cairo, Egypt, this pastor said to him, as a pastor that suffers at the hands of radical Islam, he said, ‘The…
Read More…ntended she violated school policy and the American Counseling Association code of ethics. That code, by the way, is clear about what is expected from counselors: Counselors do not condone or engage in discrimination based on age, culture, disability, ethnicity, race, religion/spirituality, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status/partnership, language preference, socioeconomic status, or any basis proscribed by law. Counselors…
Read More
…his purposes. So Trump was compared to the ancient Persian King Cyrus, who freed Jewish prisoners and helped build the temple in Jerusalem. This provided evangelicals with a remarkable escape hatch from the political and moral norms that previously governed most evangelical engagement in public life. These two elements also animate the NAR’s activities internationally. ‘It’s a 7M world’ In his book, God’s Chaos Code, 7 Mountains strategist and NAR…
Read More
…nt), it’s hard to imagine that Syria would be allowed to decide its future free of foreign influence. The same can be said to apply to the entire region, a patchwork of different sects, ethnicities, languages, and religions, which, when combined with the push for more accountable governance, could be a massive problem with no easy resolution. It may well be across this region that the so-called Saudi-Iranian Cold War, over the future of the Middle…
Read More…” Homosexuality is considered a crime in Morocco. Article 489 of the penal code states that any one found guilty of carrying out “a deviant act with a person of the same sex” will be jailed for to up to three years. Last week three men accused of homosexuality were jailed to three years each. In March, Human Rights Watch called on Morocco to decriminalise homosexuality, saying that “criminalising consensual, adult homosexual conduct violates inter…
Read More
…ng to burn and send you to hell, where you all belong.” Ireland: New group promotes LGBT inclusion in Presbyterian Church The Belfast Telegraph reports on a retired lawyer’s efforts to create a group that would promote inclusion of LGBT people in the Presbyterian Church, an effort “to emulate the success of existing grups such as Changing Ireland and Accepting Sexuality, which have been operating within the Church of Ireland and the Irish Methodis…
Read More
…granted permits for worship services. The new churches valued not just the free real estate, but also the proximity to children and families, and the credibility provided by their new physical setting. Owing to the fact that schools are generally available to the community only on Sundays, not Fridays or Saturdays, the opportunity was not open in any significant way to Muslim or Jewish congregations. “We have been enjoying meeting in the school th…
Read More
…majority will continue to ignore the establishment clause and blow up the free exercise clause into a broadly applicable special rights provision. A free ticket for the religious to exempt themselves from federal and state laws—most importantly, public health and anti-discrimination laws. JS: Do these special rights provisions apply equally? The court is on a mission to remake free-exercise law. Not too long ago, it held that religious people and…
Read More…e free speech cases, the plaintiffs have argued that the separation of the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses by a semicolon requires that the two clauses be interpreted, for these purposes, identically. (Filmmaker Drew Emery calls the upcoming Supreme Court case “the world’s most closely watched semicolonoscopy.”) In Conestoga, though, the Third Circuit rejected those arguments. “We are not persuaded that the use of a semi-colon means that eac…
Read More
…legal traditions, Islamic or otherwise, discussed consent in the way we do today. In the past, she said, “we don’t hear about consent in marriage, or in relationships where sex is lawful. What we do hear and read about is that anyone, slave or free, who is harmed, can take that case to a judge. A woman could go to a court and say her husband hit her, bruised her—she could get compensation.” In the Prophetic period, consent was often passive: Expec…
Read More