Religion Dispatches
…honor killing; the report was deemed worthy of international coverage because the Palestinian women had broken “the code of silence” by resorting to Israeli courts. The implications of this juxtaposition of two unrelated events are that Palestinians belong to a backward, patriarchal culture that, rightly or wrongly, is under attack by a modern, “democratic” state with a legal apparatus that supports women’s rights. Others have shown that the New…
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…s to employees’ dependents. Legal statutes strengthened the rights of a spouse at the expense of other kin, including parents and adult children. Lack of a marriage license meant that courts, hospitals, or landlords would refuse to accept a couple’s claim that they were entitled to such privileges. This was a departure from the long tradition in which private, informal agreements to live as a couple entitled a man and a woman to public recognition…
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…as partly because of Cantor’s effort to grasp the infinite, and partly because he was ridiculed by so many mathematicians who refused to try. Supercomputers might let researchers expand our understanding of pi. But even then, the task is endless. When people search for pi, they search for the infinite. They’ll never reach it, as long as they’re finite beings with finite imaginations. But there’s some wonder that comes with trying. Some satisfactio…
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…em a little bit nervous.’ Of course, you can’t do ANY of that legally, because it’s the very definition of voter intimidation, which is illegal. The Code of Laws of the United States of America states that: “Whoever intimidates, threatens, coerces, or attempts to intimidate, threaten, or coerce, any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of such other person to vote or to vote as he may choose, or of causing such other person t…
Read More…know better. Shame on you, Michele! You should stand on the floor of the House and apologize to Huma Abedin and to Secretary Clinton and to the millions of hardworking, loyal, Muslim Americans for your wild and unsubstantiated charges. As a devoted Christian, you need to ask forgiveness for this grievous lack of judgment and reckless behavior. (emphasis mine) House Speaker John Boehner today called Bachmann’s accusations “pretty dangerous.” This a…
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…ning) than on religion, defined in terms of religious institutions. Ethics codes, like the Code of Ethics for Nurses of the American Nurses Association, emphasize the importance of patients’ spiritual well-being and the NANDA International, which develops language around nursing diagnoses, recognizes three diagnoses related to spirituality and spiritual distress. In medical and broader public discourse about religion, spirituality, and medicine, i…
Read More…there is broad agreement on what is called “delayed ensoulment.” That was code for saying that the fetus does not attain to personal status until it is well formed. Early miscarriages could not be named or given religious funerals. Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas held that the early fetus had the moral status of a plant, and that not even God could infuse a spiritual, person-making soul until the fetus was developed; some put this today at si…
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…d his community” (which basically means Sunni, though sectarians of all stripes treat it as a literal description of their pet approach to Islam; it is surprisingly difficult to find an accessible but nonpartisan explanation of this crucial concept online) were routinely used as code in some Muslim organizations for “Sufis (to say nothing of the hated Shiah) need not apply here.” As with those evangelicals who treat their rather novel dogmas as se…
Read More…f Mass Destruction and ties to Al Qaeda—are likewise successful partly because of this conservative cognitive training in the rejection of mainstream media and the cultivation of other sources of information, like Fox News at first, but also now websites like Breitbart, 4chan, Infowars, and others. The goal of “fake news” and “alternative facts” goes beyond providing different data. Their purpose is actually to destroy the notion that there could…
Read More…known for attacks on Scientology, decided to send a message to the Catholic Church by shutting down the official Vatican website (still not responding as of this posting). What are the Church’s misdeeds, according to these code crusaders? They go back to the selling of indulgences in the 16th century. And more recently, of course, there’s the Church’s interference in Italy’s domestic politics. (Not just Italy, we’d have to say.) – The Eds. …
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