Religion Dispatches
…whether we have finally woken up from our dream of perpetually cheap oil, free of all cost, free of all sacrifice. And yet the events in the Gulf call out for confession, for corporate confession and repentance. By corporate I mean BP, of course, but even more importantly I mean our society as a corporate whole. We must move beyond defensiveness and self-righteousness and work toward a cultural consensus that acknowledges the vital work of regula…
Read More…to me it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use to — to use their religion to hurt others. So that’s just my personal point of view. Rice said this in 2014, when the Commission had already written its order and rejected the bakery’s arguments three separate times. It changed nothing. More importantly, Rice’s statements are true. Religion has been used to justify slavery and murder. But the court found this hostile to…
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…and plunging the country I love into a Great Depression, I’d happily die.” Better for a whole lot more people to suffer and die than for the free market to be stifled any further. It’s the economy, stupid! Given the prevalence of religious voices among support for Trump, perhaps we could think about our situation with the ethics of religious responsibly as outlined above. A simple translation of “restart the economy” suggests itself: the economy o…
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…eteenth-century polygamy controversy. Marriage is a unique institution because it is always both public and private, and both religious and civil. What then are the freedoms and limitations to religious expression in marriage? With nineteenth-century polygamy some of the debate was over the validity of the religion and Joseph Smith as a prophet, but a significant part of the debate was about the treatment of women in polygamy. There were sensation…
Read More…clichéd word turbulence, and free love, and things like that. But there’s free love in the 1920s; there’s free love in the 1930s; the beatnik movement in the 1950s. No one invented any of this. What was different in the 60s, according to Weiner, was that baby boomers were spoiled: plenty of education, money, entertainment; there was a war, but you could get out of it if you were lucky. This vision of unprecedented opportunity strikes me as fair;…
Read More…us law against LGBT people in the modern world; and that President Yoweri Museveni used in a ceremonial signing of the anti-gay bill in Uganda. This year Gambia’s president Yahya Jammeh called for gay people’s throats to be slit. Alimi says it was a huge task to prepare to teach a course on pre- and post-colonial sexual orientation and sexual identity in Africa. In digging up facts I found that, while many Africans say that homosexuality is un-Afr…
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…, in recent years, this sweeping illiberal agenda has weaponized religious freedom to promote a militant, literal, and illiberal Christian ideology that embraces Christianity as a bedrock American identity. This agenda not only claims a special place for religion in American culture but demands that the laws of the land be based on Christian morals, ethics, and history. In other words, it has its sights set on the rights and liberties not of relig…
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…he OCA, the Synod of Bishops have the authority to restrict their right to free academic speech and thought. Academic freedom, which was arguably founded in Medieval Christianity, has always been subject to institutional affiliation. But the OCA document doesn’t specify who might be at risk. Does it pertain to OCA lay members employed at institutions and/or writing academic articles for publications unaffiliated with the OCA? There is (or at least…
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…, but there was certainly a great amount of freedom—and not just religious freedom. There was freedom to sell anything you want, to buy anything you want, to be anything you want, to believe anything you want, and to create any kind of religion you want. You may be persecuted for that, as the Mormons were, but if you’re willing to take on that risk, go nuts! So, yes—because we could, we did. That’s part of it. But I’m skeptical that this fully exp…
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…at it does because they worry that liberal guilt regarding Liberia might cause us to foolishly admit more of “them”—the Ebola- contaminated ones—to our homeland hospitals. I say that it matters because, as a practical matter, our shared history with Liberia ought to make it possible for us to be more strategically helpful in the Ebola crisis rather than pretend that Liberia is a place we know nothing about. To engage with an aggressive disease-con…
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