Religion Dispatches
…d appeared the year before, and Mark Zuckerberg was feverishly writing the code that would become Facebook. YouTube was just an idea, and wouldn’t appear online in any form until 2005. John Paul did embrace social media as it existed then. He was the first pope to use SMS to send out a daily message to Catholics in 2004, after brokering a deal with Verizon—one of the first troubling commercial agreements between the Vatican and communications comp…
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…he has a tiger by the tail.”[91] Paramilitaries the world over routinely abuse their connections to formal power to settle personal scores, rent-seek, and abuse vulnerable people. If Trump wins the GOP nomination (and ultimately the presidency), Bedford and Campbell Counties’ militias could settle personal and political scores with abandon. Virginians may continue to vote in elections, but in counties with militias, democracy hangs in the balance….
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…re August 2001. Many conservative Christians oppose stem-cell research because they are harvested from embryos left over from fertility treatments. Because the process destroys the embryo, they argue that it’s akin to abortion. In signing the executive order, Obama disagreed: “In recent years, when it comes to stem-cell research, rather than furthering discovery, our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and…
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…e Dobbs decision was in a sense the end of the beginning of the pro-life cause. Now comes the real fight, in state houses across the country, to outlaw completely the barbaric practice of killing the unborn.” This would, of course, mean making abortion a crime—and jailing women and their doctors for murder, a crime which in some states is still punishable by death. Davidson’s totalitarian dream would also entail finding a solution to what he calls…
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…o we can understand each other and communicate with wider publics, but because we do not use religious language in our laws and regulations, which are necessarily secular. All this brings me back around the matter of history and the Constitution Linell raises. Firstly, it is important to note as she does, that the principles of the Constitution took a long time to be integrated widely and deeply into our public life. It’s been an uneven process an…
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…re—it deserves the scare quotes that the Chicago Manual of Style says are “used to alert readers that a term is used in a nonstandard (or slang), ironic, or other special use.” At the very least, the clearly coordinated and targeted effort to rebrand the freedom to discriminate as “religious freedom” meets the Oxford English Dictionary’s criteria for the use of scare quotes (emphasis mine): Quotation marks used around a word or phrase when they ar…
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…a long, gloomy history tracing back to the antebellum South. Slave owners used the passage to justify slavery, and racists have used it ever since to defend police brutality against people of color. Meanwhile, the president’s critics have also responded by using the Bible to condemn Trump. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invoked Ecclesiastes 3:3 (“a time to heal”), Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Michael Curry cited the Golden Rule and the prophet M…
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…ethamphetamine, xenon, ibogaine, bufotenine, and LSD. Although the show focuses on users and researches of the drugs in question, Morris often acts as a participant-observer, using the drugs himself to report their effects. Whatever the drug in question, however, the narrative always seems to circle back to questions relating to religion, in both explicit and inexplicit ways. Morris doesn’t so much present theses about the relationship between rel…
Read More…s have played in promoting conservative policies and the political tactics used to advance them. The report discusses the right’s use of “gender ideology,” which it describes as a “pseudo-scientific term” that “is used as a political tool to curtail further development of sexual and reproductive health and rights.” From the report (with source citations removed): This strategic attempt by Catholic church to redefine cultural and political debate r…
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…have been following it closely. Sinauer Associates is a small publishing house that publishes college-level science textbooks, some of which are used in high school advanced placement classes. Sinauer, along with W.H. Freeman jointly published Hillis’ Science of Biology and Molecular Systemics. President Andrew Sinauer said his company would never consider inserting anti-evolution language into a textbook to make a sale to creationists. “We simply…
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