Religion Dispatches
…the state to insist on its way, and for them to gain their administrative freedom, would be to abrogate that curious tax exemption for an institution as wealthy as the Catholic Church in a time of real fiscal crisis. But clearly, this would lend itself to the very Big Brother vision of the federal government that created this controversy in the first place. Instead, President Obama, ever the patient compromiser, attempted to create a new distinct…
Read More…all Street hucksters? But here’s the kicker: The fact that Jesus chose the free market system as the basis for this parable should not be overlooked. When the nobleman returns, after being established as king – a stand-in for Jesus – he calls all his servants together to see what they had accomplished in his absence. Ah. The kingdom Jesus is expecting upon his return is a free market system? Novel. Perkins goes on to argue that Jesus “rejected col…
Read More…deo-Christian” values and nations. Lind worked at the Paul Weyrich-founded Free Congress Foundation as its Director of its Center for Cultural Conservatism, a position he left in 2009. Berlet dates Lind’s first significant writing on “cultural Marxism” to 1997. Berlet: Most significant is a collection of essays published by the Free Congress Foundation in 2004 on cultural Marxism, political correctness, and multiculturalism. The editor of that col…
Read More…lear light of day, not almost in secret like some of their colleagues from Germany, France, and Switzerland, who had gathered a few days before at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. But while at the Gregorian the objective was changing the Church’s stance on divorce and homosexuality, in Accra the push was in the other direction. The marching route was indicated from the very first remarks by Guinean cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect of the…
Read More…1938, Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland was turned into crocodile food for Nazi Germany. The Nazi beast smelled the weakness in the appeasers, ate the food and marched and devoured most of Europe and systematically slaughtered 6,000,000 Jewish people. Hagee used essentially the same rhetoric in a speech at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend last year. Because Perry is speaking in New York, and with Jewish leaders, the assumption is he’s angling for t…
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…ere really is an international scholarly culture and it continues to value freedom of enquiry, the discovery of new materials, and the promotion of novel points of view. What you sense most clearly at the Vatican Library is that popes come and go, as professors do, but books and the society of learning remain. We are all links in a chain, not just the men who claim an apostolic succession going back to Peter. The fact that this book is on display…
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…y enough to Krampus, Santa’s ill-tempered companion throughout Austria and Germany, who goes far beyond coal in the stocking when reminding children that he knows who’s been naughty or nice. For Krampus fans—who are becoming legion—this Yuletide boogeyman comes and goes much too quickly. And it turns out Bourdain thought so, too. What he’d hoped to air is a bit of mischief that would have elevated the No Reservations holiday special from simply ve…
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…lamic yet liberal view of the world is possible. Muslims can tolerate the “freedom to sin,” for example, not because they condone sin, but that its judgment should be left to God. Can you explain what you mean by liberalism? By liberalism, I mean a political and economic system which limits the powers of the state, and gives individuals, and their voluntary associations, the freedom to shape their destinies. I think liberty has been a value throug…
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…e countries, how much more so these new democracies? And, I might add, the Freedom and Justice Party, like Turkey’s AKP, is a conservative, free-market party; they may, in this climate, simply be best suited to govern, although Egypt—like Turkey—enjoys a far broader social consensus around social welfare and mutual obligation than does the United States (don’t take the economic implications of right-wing too far). Nevertheless, perhaps unexpectedl…
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…aim total authority over civil governments and deny the right to religious freedom would be chastening. (A read of John Julius Norwich’s Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy would likewise tame even the most extreme papal fever.) Steinfels faults O’Brien for his “minimization of the moral status of the unborn but developing human lives”—i.e. fetuses. Fetuses have moral status but their value does not trump all other values. Giving fetuses ab…
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