Religion Dispatches
…e religious traditions. It did this by invoking the rhetorical distinction between “spirituality” and “religion.” Indeed, scholar Robert Fuller has argued that the phrase “spiritual but not religious” was coined by AA. Over time Western societies have liberalized, leaving AA to the right of present cultural norms. The “God of your own understanding” sounded so liberal in the 1930s whereas now, mention of the word “God”—regardless of the qualifiers…
Read More…hrough the gate leading to the water, one must punch in a combination pass code. The town’s elegantly manicured gardens belie its state’s housing market collapse. But just outside of town, realtors advertise “Free Foreclosure Lists!” Sitting along a commons of lush grass, an attractive young couple casually dressed in designer sunglasses, khakis, and expensive sandals led a group of fair-haired children in prayer. The young blond woman urged the c…
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…dictates of the prophetic voice through a regimented system of behavior: a code of conduct thoroughly imbued with an ethos and a morality. The most articulate condemnations of torture that Judaism has to offer are therefore presented most effectively as deeply spiritual legal analyses. The best of these, in recent years, was composed by Rabbi Melissa Weintraub for Rabbis for Human Rights, an international organization focusing on a number of progr…
Read More…views on everyone else, but make sure they’re free to mock that very moral code. Democrats fear that argument. That’s why their approach has been, especially since about 2006 or so, to try to make themselves out to be the “authentic” Christians who truly care about their neighbors and all that. The Aqua Buddha ad may have been a bad strategic move in Kentucky; we’ll never really know. But Conway — without, as far as I can tell, invoking treacly re…
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…ight divisions. The Pew social conservatism index reveals some deep chasms between the evangelical left/center and right. On social issues, the differences are most pronounced on the issues of stem cell research, abortion, and the morning after pill. A majority of left/center evangelicals support stem-cell research, legalized abortion, and access to the morning after pill without a prescription. There is a remarkable 50-point gap between left/cent…
Read More…for the constitutional definition of marriage to be altered, from a union between two spouses to one specifically between a man and a woman. In July 2016, the country’s Constitutional Court accepted the validity of the proposal, paving the way for a referendum on the topic, which could be held next year. As the article notes, “European Union laws give the citizens of the bloc’s member states and their family members the right to move and freely r…
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…e following: the Inventor of the laws of physics and Programmer of the DNA code decided to enter the uterus of a Jewish virgin, got himself born, then deliberately had himself tortured and executed because he couldn’t think of a better way to forgive the theft of an apple, committed at the instigation of a talking snake. Since I live in Oklahoma (the purported Buckle of the Bible Belt), one might expect that Dawkins was envisioning a neighborhood…
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…t of a broader prohibition on sex in war zones), and that she might not be promoted as a result: a potentially career-ending situation in the Marines, where failure to obtain regular promotions results in being discharged. Moreover, as a woman in the military, accustomed to proving herself to her male peers over her six-year career, Amy was wary of appearing a “weak female.” “If you get sent home for something like that, everyone will know about i…
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…red to marriage.’ Fidelsberger argues the civil partnership law is the far better one, because it is written in modern language. But, more importantly, she says it does better than the antiquated and often-amended marriage laws when it comes to fulfilling the demands of a modern relationship where both partners have equal rights. ‘Because of this we don’t want to swap civil partnerships for marriage in its current form,’ she said. ‘It would be dow…
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…a Buddhist, or any of Sheldon Adelson’s businesses? Trying to draw a line between “business with religious roots” and “everything else in global capitalism” is, quite simply, an absurd exercise. So why bother with this kind of research, anyway? Do these numbers tell us anything useful? For one thing, a big economic impact number might jibe with the goals of the elder Grim’s Religious Freedom and Business Foundation. But more generally, as the Gri…
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