Religion Dispatches
…going to allow religious objectors to completely opt-out of laws by continually re-defining the burden on their religious exercise, regardless of the impact on third parties and the harms done to them. And you can bet if that strategy succeeds here, we’ll see it in use very soon in other contexts, like exemptions to LGBT non-discrimination laws and marriage equality protections. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that….
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…mmigration or health care. Yes, the storytelling business is messy and diffuse. It doesn’t lend itself to sound bites as readily as the “I’m right/you’re wrong” confrontational throwdown does. But religious progressives in particular might well benefit from going this route, because so many of us have journeyed farther and over rockier ground than have our conservative counterparts. Storytelling is already powerful when we hear the stories of ot…
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…world of prosperity gospel preachers, whose claims about the relationship between faith, donations to the church, and personal well-being strike many outsiders as a straightforward, money-motivated swindle. In the business of hope, there’s already very little overlap between the legal and the ethical—and, it seems, little clarity on where the legal marketing ends and the illegal stuff begins. What’s clear is that dreams are good business. It’s fi…
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…mophobia in the culture and in the appropriately-named ICE agency, you can bet that the “permanent” test will actually be considerably more rigorous for same-sex applicants than for “legally married – five minutes ago” couples. Sixteen other countries already recognize same-sex couples for immigration purposes, including Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Israel, South Africa, Sweden, and the UK. It is estimated that 36,000 U.S.-based couples wou…
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…e crowds at the inauguration? What a flock, right? You had a great view, I bet, the original Eye in the Sky. Back me up, it was over a billion people. Huge. But I’m confused about this other line: “the quality of our lives is not defined by our material success but by our spiritual success.” I don’t get it. “Spiritual success”? Sounds like a dumb deal. Ewww…I don’t have money, I have my feeeelings… What do you think, Lord? What if I say that some…
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…espair the priest cries out: “God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?” Whether this story is an atheist parable, or a meditation on the vulnerability of faith, it brings the question of religion’s encounter with extraterrestrials into sharp focus. Like those religious thinkers who have addressed the possibility of alien inte…
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…rad students have wasted their potential on fruitless arguments in coffeehouses, we’re sorry. You’re going to want that free refill. Decaf, preferably, so you’re not up all night worrying about the disappearance of tenure and the surfeit of bad life choices you’ve made. “Algebra” by Emily Coble 5. Algebra For every time you’ve had to solve for x, a Muslim has duped you. Algebra was refined by an 8th century Persian Muslim mathematician, al-Khwariz…
Read More…r party presidential candidate. But I’ll bet you a twelve pack of caffeine-free Diet Coke and a dozen pink-frosted sugar cookies that there is no anti-Mormon phonebanking script in use by Catholics for Obama. Anywhere. Is anti-Mormonism real? Yes. But even if one poorly-trained rogue phonebanker veered off script into an anti-Mormon ad lib, it does not make for a concerted anti-Mormon effort. (Leave that to orthographically challenged “Heaven is…
Read More…on Twitter that he helped Cardinal Timothy Dolan with his recent paean to free-market capitalism in the Wall Street Journal (note to Mr. Kudlow, there is a reason they call it “ghostwriting”): I worked w/ @CardinalDolan on this @WSJopinion op-ed. It does strike balance. Tell me what you think. #tcot. http://t.co/BvSBxoHrdI — Larry Kudlow (@larry_kudlow) May 23, 2014 Kudlow is a former Reagan Administration official who is well known for his suppo…
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…rganized religion (religio = binding) in their lives. Protestantism spawns free thought and free radicals (some of them toxic) the way a prism breaks light into uncountable and unclassifiable hues. So while it is definitely not fair to count the great unchurched free radicals of the 19th and 20th centuries as official Protestants, there is no doubt at all that, unofficially, that is just what many were: not just the towering Lincoln but also such…
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