Religion Dispatches
…– two markers that usually make for anti-marriage equality opinions. One glaring flaw is the diversity of the sample – 75 percent of the respondents were white, but the majority of those polled were women at 53 percent. While the numbers may seem surprising, in light of conservatives’ historically strong support for states’ rights on this issue perhaps they shouldn’t be. Potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates like Texas Congressman Ron…
Read More…dismissed, but last November, a federal judge ruled that the exemption violated the establishment clause and the suit could proceed. The IRS is appealing, making this a rare instance of the federal government trying not to take money from American citizens. In federal terms, there isn’t much cash at stake—the estimates range from $700 to $800 million per year. But this is less about the principal than the principle. The FFRF believes that clergy…
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…hat FRC president Tony Perkins was on the GOP committee that drafted that platform last year. In addition to several direct quotes from Sprigg that position same-sex attraction as a sinful choice that can be changed, the authors do not directly critique FRC’s framing of the harmful practice as benign-sounding “sexual reorientation therapy.” Although the article does include boilerplate statements from several leading medical and mental health orga…
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…iocesan bishop in the United States, and every bishop in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Kingdom and South Africa has received the offer of a download. Each member of the Council of Cardinals, its secretary, and Pope Francis has received a copy, along with the original Italian-languages essays. If the hierarchy will consider what history really says, perhaps they will think about whether they need to restore the tradition of women as d…
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…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 important debates and produced some of the most fruitful arguments in support of National Conservati…
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…we can use 990 forms to find out what sort of organizations receive particularly large donations via the Signatry. And wasn’t it… who was that again? Oh yes, it was Jesus who reputedly said, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” and in that instance, at least, he had a point. According to the Signatry’s 2020 form, the most recent available, in 2019 the organization directed over $19 million of funding to Alliance Defending F…
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…abwe, just as overlooked and beleaguered… Big companies have always sought cheaper labor, moving from North to South in the United States, looking for the hungriest, the most desperate, the least organized, the most exploitable. Press coverage of conditions in Apple’s factories in China has been anything but glowing. Yet when Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, says he’ll give his personal wealth to charities of his choice (many of them in Silicon Valley), he…
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…taphor, forgetting that the so-called patient being “tested” is actually an 800-pound gorilla that needs to be put into a cage if not shot dead outright. Johnson pointed out this morning that today’s news non-event even has a kind of Goldilocks character that the big media are bound to lap right up. It will turn out that the $1 trillion in TARP is an amount “just right” to cover the self-declared capital needs of the big banks. Bernanke said this…
Read More…ot alone. Hartford Seminary boasts the Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, the country’s oldest center of its kind. A second imam training program is being launched by the once all-Christian Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley; its website calls it “the largest and most diverse partnership of seminaries and graduate schools in the United States, pursuing interreligious collaboration in teaching, research, min…
Read More…nd a woman, then the culture war is over and we’ve lost—and gradually, secularism will replace Christianity as the foundation of our society.” “California is a big dam, holding back the flood—and if you take down the dam in California, it’s going to flood 49 other states,” Wildmon maintained. “It will destroy marriage as it has been known for thousands of years [For an opposing view from a historian of the family see Stephanie Coontz’s “Tradit…
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