Religion Dispatches
…aithful to encourage them to “vote Catholic”—i.e. vote for the Romney/Ryan ticket. Leading the charge is Bishop Daniel Jenky, of Peoria, Illinois, who is calling for all priests “by virtue of their vow of obedience to me as your Bishop” to read his letter on the election at each mass they celebrate this weekend. The letter, addressed to Catholic believers, is an appeal to the “threat to religious liberty” because of the HHS mandate. Since Bishop J…
Read More…— they want to go see Allah, I’m all in favor of giving them a first class ticket if — if they don’t respect human life and dignity. What Jesus is getting at, Mr. Hannity, is that those who truly have respect for human life and dignity understand that it is better to love an enemy than it is to hate them and wish for (or facilitate) their destruction. Hannity is no better than the fanatics he condemns since has no respect for their lives or their…
Read More
…ram, Titus ran on Constitution Party founder Howard Phillips’ presidential ticket in 1996. The stated goal of the Constitution Party “is to restore American jurisprudence to its biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.” That includes, for example, “affirm[ing] the rights of states and localities to proscribe offensive sexual behavior” (i.e., homosexuality) and “oppos[ing] all efforts to impose a ne…
Read More
…an religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with sur…
Read More
…f the total revenue of American religious congregations. To get that final number, the Grims took one estimate of the total number of congregations in America (344,894) and multiplied it by another estimate of the average revenue of each ($242,910). Depending on how you look at it, $378 billion is a lot of money, or it’s not very much money at all. It’s more than the net worth of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, combined…
Read More
…ere not companionship-based. They were economic arrangements. Okay, that’s number 1. Number 2, let’s say that your wife didn’t provide you with a male offspring. A man could take another wife and another wife and another wife until one of them did. This is the “sanctity of marriage” that is being protected. Are you kidding me? Wow. Okay, so that’s Old Testament. Then along comes Jesus. Well for those of us who follow Jesus, I always like to point…
Read More
…et. The Kyoto Protocol, which commits industrialized countries to internationally binding emission reduction targets, was the first climate treaty to emerge from this process. It was passed at COP3 in December 1997 at Kyoto, Japan and came into force in February 2005 when a sufficient number of developed countries signed the agreement; the United States did not, hampering negotiations for the next decade. A successor agreement, involving all count…
Read More
…he Opera Theatre to be banned. The European Court of Human Rights has on a number of occasions found that the likelihood of counter-events does not justify restricting citizens right to peaceful assembly. The regional police also asked for the ban, although it is they who are obliged to protect all citizens exercising their right to gather. Indonesia: Anti-Gay Islamists Continue Rhetorical War On LGBTs Weeks of escalating anti-gay rhetoric in Indo…
Read More
…ings from Arab and Muslim governments with the countries’ legal regimes, a number of which punish homosexuality with death. A hacker identifying with Anonymous flooded some ISIS-related Twitter accounts with rainbow flags, gay porn, and fake “coming out” tweets. Mexico: Church driving down support for marriage equality; activists worry about threats In the weeks since President Enrique Peña Nieto announced plans to push for a constitutional change…
Read More
…nt and the destruction of national sovereignty and religion. A significant number of Christian dispensationalists subscribe to this view and believe that the New World Order was foretold in the Book of Revelation. In 2005, Mark Dice (using the pseudonym “John Connor” in reference to the Terminator film franchise) organized a Christian group opposed to the New World Order called “The Resistance” and began a campaign to have the monument destroyed….
Read More