Religion Dispatches
…te of unintended pregnancy, such as younger women and women of color. As usual, the Catholic bishops are tying to undercut support for the continuum of women’s health care needs by treating contraception, and the women who use it, with contempt. Happy Easter Cardinal Dolan….
Read More…d self-congratulation. Dickens makes the most of Pecksniff by giving him a number of interior monologues, as here when Pecksniff is rationalizing his decision to pimp out his younger daughter at a rather cheap dowry price to a rich but grotesquely uncouth suitor: All his life long he had been walking up and down the narrow ways and by-places, with a hook in one hand and a crook in the other, scraping all sorts of valuable odds and ends into his po…
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…craft engaging narratives. In sum, those of us sitting comfortably in our cheap desk chairs in our sterile offices in the nation’s colleges and universities have no higher ground to stand on. While we all labor to maintain an appropriate level of nuance, complexity, and context in our work, there is no doubt that we could write bigger books and assign our students more reading to gain deeper contextualization and fit more people and more themes a…
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…e American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Times, Barack Obama, health care, and “all the lawyers and academics and schooled-up ‘experts’ in DC.” The good side of the Palin polarity includes the following: Toby Keith, Newt Gingrich, Calvin Coolidge, Simon Cowell, Whittaker Chambers, Michele Bachmann, William Bennett, Laura Ingraham, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan. Actually, Reagan enjoys a far higher status than simply “good.” He’s somet…
Read More…te of unintended pregnancy, such as younger women and women of color. As usual, the Catholic bishops are tying to undercut support for the continuum of women’s health care needs by treating contraception, and the women who use it, with contempt. Happy Easter Cardinal Dolan. …
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…recognizing the business interests that make us hire “illegals” for child care, elder care, restaurant work, and more. Those who think there are too many Mexicans here might want to rethink the United States’ trade and aid policies to Mexico so that it too could be an economically viable place for people to live. That would be an extravagant, realistic creativity. Religious people are also pragmatic people. Being pro-Spirit does not mean you are…
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…rdened future generations with horrendous debt and have greatly accelerated the “secession of the successful” that was already surging in the Clinton years. We do know that carrying the cuts forward would carry forward some of the worst of the Bush legacy. Shall we then persist in sinning?…
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…on deteriorated with the beginning of the second intifada in fall 2000 and cheap Palestinian labor became increasingly inaccessible due to curfews and roadblocks designed to prevent terrorist attacks. And they came, creating in the process a mosaic of cultural diversity. Most of Israel’s foreign workers (30 percent) came from Thailand but many migrated from the Philippines (18%), and from China (10%), Nepal (6%) and Romania (5%). They were willing…
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…Most Americans claim to value tolerance and religious freedom. But talk is cheap, especially if you have never seriously thought about what these commitments might actually mean in a pluralistic society. I was disturbed to read some of TST’s Christian opponents openly renouncing religious freedom if it meant respecting the freedoms of Satanists. I also think TST is forcing the public to think more critically about what “religion” is. They are dire…
Read More…hese are big words — hope, forgiveness and peace. They rarely have the megaphone that the party of “nope” enjoys. Nevertheless, they are words that religious people need to protect with all our hearts and souls. We too need a department of homeland security and its job is to protect our words. Let’s start with hope. When a tragedy happens, it often steals our hope. The 9-11 bombing is a terrible tragedy. It is a tragedy with causes in a larger hum…
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