Religion Dispatches
…only the latest wave of an Islamic ‘tsunami’ sweeping the globe.” Oh, and look! The Brotherhood has learned its tactics from Bill Ayers and Code Pink. Don’t you love living in a fact-free world?…
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…r worldly peers while simultaneously beholden to an arcane and restrictive code of behavior—is actually rather compelling. “Being tugged in one direction by the secular world and in another by the religious world, they have styled their own compromise,” he says, “[and yet] they also feel an unbearable sense of loneliness and despair.” But the extent to which Cohen understands his own motivations for journeying into Christendom is unclear. “I’m hop…
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…t the church from hoarding this wealth (though other provisions of the tax code do). Transparency would simply require the church to disclose the details of their cache. Sunlight does not burden religious liberty, it cures fraud and abuse. Asking for transparency from every nonprofit is perfectly legal, but Congress has not acted. In an era of congressional gridlock and where civil rights laws demanding equality are maligned as anti-religious libe…
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…rite and successfully lobbied for in 2008. The LSEA instructs educators to promote “critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” It also allows teachers and school districts to use “supplemental textbooks,” which are just code words for creationist and pro-intelligent design materi…
Read More…about race; Edwards said that frequently progressives speak “in their own code,” which “sends people away” rather than “draw[ing] them in.” She added, “I want to make sure we’re using language to draw people in who share the same concerns about declining jobs and opportunity.” Edwards was reacting to someone in the audience bringing up the term “white privilege;” Edwards, who is African-American, cautioned that when people of color use that termi…
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…ernment”=”tyranny,” for the GOA and many others on the religious right, is code for government is supplanting God’s will and plan for what America is and should be. As Julie and I reported in a piece about the GOA over the summer, GOA’s position is rooted in its religion, not the Constitution (which it believes is a reflection of God’s will, not human hands): The militia movement and Christian Reconstructionism both contend that our current civil…
Read More…orth Vietnam, the way he turned to the thought of his fellow captives, the code of honor of the US military, to the Constitution itself, one never hears that he turned to his God, or to prayer. I do not suggest that he ought to have done, of course. I simply note that this absence is glaring, and his religious silence is deafening. That is what made the appearance of both men together on the bizarre political platform of a Baptist church all the m…
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…diverse. Maybe these explorers did see people whom a modern American would code as white. Maybe not. As Robinson demonstrates in The Lost White Tribe, the better questions here have to do with the interpretation of bodies, not just with the bodies themselves. Basically: why were European and American adventurers so eager to find these far-flung white tribes in the first place? And they were eager. Reports of white Indians and white Africans made h…
Read More…atened gay Congressman Claudio Arriagada Macaya. Ireland: Interfaith group promotes marriage equality, Catholic bishop warns against As Ireland heads toward a May referendum on marriage equality, an interfaith coalition, Faith in Marriage Equality, has been formed to urge support. Richard O’Leary said the group was created to let people of faith know that they can vote yes, adding that media attention has focused on conservative Christian groups a…
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…the establishment of the Iroquois Confederation and the revelation of the Code of Handsome Lake; from the arrival of the German utopian visionaries known as the Harmonists and the founding of the Jehovah’s Witnesses to the drafting of The Pittsburgh Platform which established Reform Judaism; there are Max Vanka’s communist murals painted in St. Nicholas Croatian Church and the icons Andy Warhol saw in St. John Chrysostom’s Byzantine Catholic Chur…
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