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Take It Off, Or We’ll Make You: On Sarkozy’s Proposed Burqa Ban

…lloween masks should be similarly avoided by Muslims. Select costumes that use make-up rather than masks. Select costumes that do not use any forms of head-covering (e.g. wigs, scarves, nun’s habit, pirate hat). Dressing up as, say, Whoopi Goldberg may be impermissible because it necessitates dreadlocks. Dressing up as, say, Queen Elizabeth also involves head-wear, and should be avoided. The Muslim-Catholic comparison has already become a sore poi…

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Not All Choice is Free

…services themselves. The problem is that this creates a false distinction between the state as an actor and people as actors. State services are, all of them, provided by organizations and by people. Catholic institutions are claiming an exemption from the obligation to provide such services because they are religiously opposed to them. They are engaging in a selective opt-out, just like the guy from North Carolina. I am not convinced that any of…

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Glenn Beck’s Political Theology

…as defined by the empire, then it will bear decisively upon sociology because the freedom of God will surface in the brickyards and manifest itself as justice and compassion. That’s the God I know and love, one who provokes real change on behalf of those who cannot create it for themselves, one whose love is not threatened by a diverse society, one who wildly and without a doubt free, and calls us to real freedom, which is to live as neighbors, w…

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Mercy, Justice, and the Telephone Company

…omebody should ask them if just how committed they are to the ideal of the free market. Because the other tension in the nation-state as it has developed is the twin definition of citizenship: on the one hand, citizens are free to participate in the political realm. On the other, they’re free to participate in the economic realm, which is to say, the market. Increasingly in the post-war era, it’s that last definition that has taken precedence, lea…

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Kagan: Establishment Clause Is “Hard”

…e has leaned toward more flexibility for religious freedom (granted by the free exercise clause) than upholding the church-state divide (ensured by the establishment clause), her answers were of great interest to church-state separation advocates. But Kagan’s answers didn’t shed a lot of light on her Establishment Clause views, other than that she believes balancing these two constitutional imperatives requires, as the Court has said, “play in the…

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From Christian Temperance to D.A.R.E. — The War on Drugs Has its Roots in White Christian Nationalism

…still observing even as late as 1939. Gates was also the creator of Drug Abuse Resistance Education, better known to many Americans as D.A.R.E. The D.A.R.E. program began in Los Angeles in 1983 and placed uniformed police officers in classrooms to teach children about substance use, eventually evolving into a national program. (Remarkably little critical scholarship has been published about D.A.R.E.) Growing up in Indiana, I remember officers comi…

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Biblical Capitalism, Tony Perkins Edition

…esus “rejected collectivism and the mentality that has occupied America for the last few decades: that everyone gets a trophy – equal outcomes for inequitable performance.” Rather, Perkins maintains, “we are to “occupy,” not by railing against a free market system that rewards diligence, even though it is occasionally abused. Rather we are to occupy by  using that system ethically as a means to advance the interests of the one we serve.”  I’m sure…

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How Breivik’s “Cultural Analysis” is Drawn from the “Christian Worldview”

…, Western, Judeo-Christian culture is collapsing. It is not collapsing because it failed. On the contrary it has given us the freest and most prosperous society in human history. Rather, it is collapsing because we are abandoning it.” And then: b. ASK: What could cause such a dramatic and widespread shift in perspective? (Cultural radicals, people who hate our Judeo-Christian culture, are driving this change.) c. TRANSITION: To fully understand th…

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In Praise of Failure: Is Defining Religion Such a Good Idea?

…a bit and think about language, since we are at least talking about how we use, or should use, words. Fully to appreciate what I am saying, know that here in Riverside County, California, I am writing close in time and space to the shootings in San Bernardino. I have been driven to distraction and anger by the way the word “terrorism” is kicked about. For example: mass shootings by a white Christian, “crazy, unexplainable,” but, mass shootings by…

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As Court Prepares to Rule on Sacred Apache Site, Religious Freedom Faces an American Right Prized Above All Others

…differences between the cases. The Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa relied on the free exercise clause of the First Amendment and on the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, a law that requires only consultation with Indigenous peoples before destroying their sacred sites, not consent. But in 1993 the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was enacted to bypass the Lyng precedent and offer better protection to religious minorities, a law the Apache rely on…

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