Religion Dispatches
…te the backstory there. Haley’s use of the phrase “Catholic ghetto” is not cheap hyperbole, if you consider the history of Catholics in the United States. The US Catholic hospital system grew up in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; largely under the care of women’s religious orders, and largely to serve the poor. (Read about a few of the women who helped build Catholic health care.) The surrounding cultural landscape could be pr…
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…, it is a global issue. Immigration is a contentious issue not only in the United States, but throughout Europe and the Gulf Region, as well as in countries such as Malaysia. The unregulated movement of people across national borders is a human response to old processes, such as colonialism and imperialism, as well as new ones, including the widening and deepening of capitalism, which increasingly link us together in a common predicament and make…
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…p from 26 in 2007]… accounting for just under 50% of all executions in the United States” in 2008. “Seven of those executed had been convicted in Dallas County.” The number of executions nationwide dropped to 37 in 2008, a 14-year low. According to USA Today, “The Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment and compiles annual statistics, reports that for the most part only Southern states resumed executions. Ohio, which car…
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…inence in America are now known to be, as a matter of fact, hostile to the United States and its Constitution.” Based on the “explanatory memorandum” document identifying a number of American Muslim organizations as allies in its author’s aspirations, prosecutors in the Holy Land Foundation trial publicly labeled over 200 American Muslim organizations “unindicted co-conspirators,” a highly controversial move derided at the time by legal experts as…
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…et. The Kyoto Protocol, which commits industrialized countries to internationally binding emission reduction targets, was the first climate treaty to emerge from this process. It was passed at COP3 in December 1997 at Kyoto, Japan and came into force in February 2005 when a sufficient number of developed countries signed the agreement; the United States did not, hampering negotiations for the next decade. A successor agreement, involving all count…
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…ustice. On matters of same-sex love, this is not as easy as it sounds. The United Methodist Church in its Book of Discipline holds that “no self-avowed, practicing homosexual shall be ordained or appointed in the United Methodist Church.” The Reconciling Ministries Network and many individual Methodists oppose this policy. To date, there has been no church-wide General Conference agreement on changing the policy. But in 2008, the Methodists entere…
Read More…d relationships is a topic completely ignored throughout school teaching.” United Kingdom: LGBT equality advocates named to House of Lords Members of the House of Lords are either hereditary peers or life peers appointed by the government. Among 45 life peers announced this week are a number of LGBT equality advocates including the Lynne Feathersone, a former Liberal-Democrat member of the House of Commons who was been described as the architect o…
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…d inside the mosque one day, I came across Bab raqm tis’wa thamanin, “door number 89,” literally. The door with no name. Facing the mosque at door number one, bab maalik ’abd-al-’Aziz, this door is off to the left. Looking at the mosque floor plan, this is where the building structure of the mosque is deepest. This is “the women’s section.” I noticed as I was walking through the first floor toward door number one, the kings’ door, on my way out af…
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…cts, images of a white dude who is supposed to be Jesus, and so on and on. Numbers appear through this book, sometimes with numbing frequency and volume. Thousands of Bibles in the early years of the ABS; tens of thousands some decades later; millions and millions through the course of the twentieth century. The numbers document the stunning capacity of the ABS to flood the zone with Scriptures. Through the book, the ABS accomplished exactly that…
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…supremacy against states that were then attempting to tax the Bank of the United States out of existence. But anti-tax conservatives blithely ignore the historical context and still recite the Marshall mantra as they go to bed. They raise their children up to think of all taxation as a vicious incubus. Thanks to the oracles of conservative demigods like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, their anti-tax credo can even claim to be grounded in a k…
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