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My Business, Myself: Piercing the Corporate Veil

…. If the First Amendment has been interpreted to guarantee a corporation’s free speech rights, does it also have free religious exercise rights guaranteed by the same Amendment? Annex Medical claims it does, citing as evidence its formal Mission Statement to manufacture medical products of high quality and good value, while conducting business in a way that is pleasing to God and is faithful to Biblical principles and values. We will accomplish th…

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Destruction, Or, Why Do Fundamentalists Seem To Enjoy Blowing Things Up?

…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. Just so. The “still-speaking” God is a far bigger threat to fundamentalists than any statue or untapped oil reserve. God is free, and so are we. Neither Taliban nor American fundagelicals can rest easy while that proclamation is on the loose. P.S. Devilstower passes on an ex…

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Supreme Court Rules Religion is Special… This Time

…ened to the community after-hours should make themselves available as rent-free houses of worship. If you treat religious worship as something different than, say, student theater workshops and local running clubs, the reasoning went, then you are discriminating against religion. The same line of thought informs the world of government-funded, faith-based social services. There is no difference between a secular nonprofit drug rehabilitation servi…

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Religious Freedom Historian John Ragosta on “Religious Freedom”

…rtunity. Of the three, he thought religious freedom was the foundation because without freedom to think and believe, you could not have the other two. A republic could not work if government and church officials (what Jefferson referred to as an alliance of “kings, nobles, and priests”) were trying to control what we think or prescribe what was the “best” religion or which people were the “best” citizens based upon their religious beliefs. If peop…

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Pulitzer-Prize Winning Historian’s Latest Reveals the Problem with Today’s ‘Religious Freedom’

…than a historical summation, described by Rakove thusly: “Disestablishment promoted free exercise, and free exercise made establishment superfluous.” Beyond Belief recounts this history, and, while Rakove touches on the present, his focus is the past. But it’s impossible to read Beyond Belief and not notice that, in their desperation to “make America great again” Trump, Pence, and the other Christian nationalist politicians and judges have turned…

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The Theological Hijacking of Religious “Freedom”

…law is being used to legislate a vision of freedom that defines religious freedom as “freedom from.” Unlike the early American Baptists, who faced serious persecution, these advocates seek to use the law to protect their vision of worship in the workplace as a purity ritual. It is a vision of religious expression free from interference in the form of difference, free from the conflicting demands of our common lives, and free from any obligation t…

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Fear Not, The IRS Isn’t Colluding With Angry Atheists

…p, whose tax exempt status is under section (c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, risk their tax-exempt status if they use tax-exempt resources to endorse political candidates. Although the law is clear, no audits have been initiated since 2009, after a federal court ordered the agency to issue regulations clarifying requirements that audits of churches be authorized by an “appropriate high-level Treasury official.” During the uproar over the suppo…

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Hitching a Freedom Ride: Gay Ain’t the New Black…

…(thank God Bristol Palin and Brother Levi came to their senses!), just because a particular cleric or priest refuses to do it due to faith commitments, does not mean that it can’t be done. There is a difference between clerical prerogative and state-sanctioned discrimination. In sum, the issue of civil rights and the LBGTQ community cannot be reduced to either race or religion. It’s a matter of rights. Charles E. Cobb, an African-American journali…

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Body of Work: Remembering Daniel Berrigan, 1921-2016

…klit by fast-dimming snowlight. He scanned the Stations of the Cross. He paused, delayed. A tight suspenseful silence ensued. I thought I saw some anguishing in his deliberation. Maybe he wanted to say one thing, but, feeling constrained, had to say another. Maybe I read too much into it. “Just because you can’t do everything,” he said, “doesn’t mean you have to do nothing.” One-part koan, one-part Jesuit equivocation? Berrigan was a poet. You had…

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‘Manufactured’ Smear Campaign Attempts to Intimidate Church ‘Fasting From Whiteness’— It Didn’t Work

…icture.” Another said “If I ever see you, I’m going to give you a slap. A slap like you wouldn’t believe.” Another person said that if he ever saw me he would “stomp your ass. People like you need to be stopped.” Multiple messages were simply one word: “standby.” To be clear, threatening people because you don’t like what they have to say is a crime. Threatening a church because you don’t like the way they practice Christianity is a crime. Our Con…

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