Religion Dispatches
…chool boards “to create and foster an environment” in public schools that “promotes 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.” In addition to state-approved textbooks, teachers “may use supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze,…
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…Black women, like Harriet Tubman, were often critical in leading people to freedom from bondage. Enslaved African Americans who became Christians were baptized by traditional doctrinal formulas. But, having endured the horror of the Middle Passage, black people had already been baptized by water and fire during their involuntary migration across the Atlantic Ocean. And this water imagery is not limited to the Christian imagination. “Lemonade” evok…
Read More…atican, and the World Evangelical Alliance have worked together to issue a code for how Christians ought to evangelize. No word on how this code effects the use of Chick Tracts. A village in the Philippines celebrates its patron saint, John the Baptist, with a Mud People Festival. Reminds me of my weekend at Bonnaroo 2004. The Pope tweeted—from an iPad, no less. It’s all part of the Vatican’s new multimedia news portal, news.va. Biblical criticism…
Read More…Texas Government Code), states that “litigants in actions under the Family Code involving a marriage relationship… are protected against violations of constitutional rights and public policy in the application of foreign law.” The bill doesn’t explicitly reference sharia or Islamic law (likely because a similar bill in Oklahoma that did specifically mention sharia was struck down as discriminatory in 2012). Nevertheless, the intent of H.B. 45 is c…
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…ge your day-to-day relationship with tempting foods. Chocolate cake has to code-switch, from “a thing I want and must resist” to “a thing I don’t want right now,” and that happens in the ACC. As Roundling’s study shows, religious thoughts seem to help with short-term code switching because they offer a concrete set of alternative values. Similarly, when Warren says that caring for his body is a “stewardship issue,” he might be actively molding his…
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…the way the world itself was made.” While the ritual aspects of the Mosaic code aimed at guiding the Israelites, the theological, ontological, and ethical principles, continued into the Second Testament, aim at guiding all. The human task is to grapple with those principles—to discern how they promote our flourishing—and to further them secondarily, as co-creators. Why is such attention given to the stranger and what good could come from offering…
Read More…ed faith.) Still, West is correct. Discovery Institute folks had long been promoting critical analysis – when they weren’t busy also promoting intelligent design. As is their modus operandi, they switch between intelligent design and coded phrases like “teach the controversy” when it serves their purposes. For an example of their promotion of intelligent design in public school science class, see their 1999 booklet Intelligent Design in Public Sch…
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…Florin HIlbay asked the Supreme Court to dismiss a challenge to the Family Code ban on same-sex couples marrying. The government’s lawyer said the petition was flawed because Jesus Nicardo M Falcis III, the gay man who filed it could not show “injury in fact” from the law and had not included Congress in his petition. Falcis also said that homosexuals, like heterosexuals, can also fulfill the essential marital obligations laid down by the Family C…
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…was imported to colonized Asia and Africa, as the British drafted a penal code in the mid-1800s which outlawed same-sex acts. Internalizing the homophobia which underpinned this legislation, colonized Muslims eventually came to regard same-sex love and relations as immoral. “Although EHT might explain the infiltration of law and official politics in colonized Muslim societies, it doesn’t explain precisely how colonial homophobia transformed the e…
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…l codes. Tunisia’s anti-sodomy laws are derived from the 1913 French Penal Code, while section 347 of the penal code in Christian Cameroon is a French colonial law. Similarly, the Ottoman adoption of French codes would ban the köçek. Across the Muslim world, many of the laws criminalizing LGBTQ+ people are direct relics of colonial law. It would take generations to gradually align the region with European colonial sexual values through a shift in…
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