Religion Dispatches
…ly fascinating, and perhaps admirable, that we have come to a moment in American religious life when an Orthodox Jew can say such a thing, it also betrays a stunning naiveté. The evangelists Cohen seems to enjoy so much, though they might fetishize a Jew, presumably would not reciprocate; Jesus, after all, being the only way to the father. And he has strangely fond words for John Hagee, joining the ranks of shortsighted Jews who refuse to see the…
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…Plants? As Brunk and Coward are careful to point out, no religion or moral code is monolithic. Expert scholars may hold different views than lay practitioners of a particular faith. Throughout the book, lay adherents and expert interpreters alike offer perspectives on how GM foods intersect with their religious and ethical dietary traditions. Each author conducted additional focus groups among their respective discipline or tradition. In Lyne Lét…
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…informed public.) In all fairness, Santorum makes one good point: many Americans don’t like being told what to believe. The latest Harris poll released last week reveals that despite efforts in the past year to educate the public about evolution, Americans have not changed their views much since Harris’ 2007 poll. Forty-five percent of respondents indicated that they believe in evolution, 33 percent indicated that they don’t believe in it, and 22…
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…d by the prospect of a new nation for the Jewish people, it was most of America.’’ In 1948 President Truman, in keeping with American public opinion, granted Israel diplomatic recognition despite the protestations of many senior officials in the U.S. State Department, Secretary of State George Marshall among them. Though historians are divided on the reasons for Truman’s decision, they are agreed that among the deciding factors was Truman’s sincer…
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…orker justice issues) used Yiddish as an organizing language but spoke “American.” The conceptual vocabulary of the union movement and the socialist movement was embraced by the Jewish participants in those movements; and continued to be used when those Jews started their own organizations, such as the American Jewish Congress. During the seventies (which was, for all intents and purposes, when the sixties hit the Jewish community) and eighties, t…
Read More…it in Shorto’s account of the Texas battle. The Christian “truth” about America’s founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however—perhaps out of ire at what they see as an aggressive, secular, liberal agenda in Washington and perhaps also because they sense an opening in the battle, a sudden weakness in the lines of the secularists—some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history th…
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…a flashpoint in the so-called Charismatic Renewal, an outbreak of neo-Pentecostalism that erupted, incongruously, in American Catholicism in 1967 and spread like holy fire through the mainline Protestant denominations. The FBC’s charismatic orientation encouraged public displays of beatified passion and, more generally, a middle-class, white (read: toned-down) version of the exuberant call-and-response dynamic that has animated black Pentecostal c…
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…ed some conservative Israelis who see it as a fifth column supported by American liberals. Many of these American liberals prefer not to publicly criticize Israel (not just about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but also on issues of human and civil rights, economic justice, immigration, and the environment). Instead they support NIF, which promotes on-the-ground change. But the attack by Im Tirtzu signals an end to business as usual. Following th…
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…entific community has reached a consensus by trivializing the years of empirical research, testing and peer-reviewed study that led to the conclusion as “dogmatic fanaticism.” “What is going on is broader than attacks on specific scientific disciplines. In a way, it doesn’t matter to them which scientific discipline they are criticizing, whether it’s evolution or global warming or medicine—their main thrust is a denial of the validity of science i…
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…to make sure this predator was not around children. No one challenged the code of deference to those higher up and obedience to the rule of secrecy. Now we have “the largest institutional crisis in centuries, possibly in Church history,” declares the National Catholic Reporter in an editorial. The New York Times, which broke the story of abuse at the deaf school in Wisconsin, quotes a priest in Berlin as saying the crisis is “the worst in 100 yea…
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