Religion Dispatches
…rt families in concrete ways. He’s talking about a “more family-friendly tax code.” He wants the government to pay people to procreate. It’s a “big government” Republicans can get behind—a “baby government.” Though women of childbearing age are the people Douthat wants to get busy getting pregnant, he doesn’t talk about women very much—or the social, physical, and financial costs women still pay for having kids. Douthat blames women without talkin…
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…significance is not support for communities of color or fairness in the tax code, but rather alignment with cosmic forces of enlightenment, it makes some sense. Post-millennial lefties tend to be really scary, or really wacky, or both. In pop culture, they inhabit films like Fight Club or the latest Batman flick: utopian idealists who will use any means, including violence, to bring about the transformation they seek. In practice, though, they te…
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…s people to express different opinions,” said a YouTube spokesperson at the time. “This can be a challenge because what’s okay in one country can be offensive elsewhere.” International human rights treaties guarantee all citizens freedom of thought and freedom of expression. But these treaties are binding on states, not on the media corporations that enable the exercise of such freedoms. It remains to be seen whether national legislation and the…
Read More…widely expanding the universe of organizations that would qualify for the exemption. The exemption does not apply to for-profit companies, some of whom have sued the Obama administration, claiming that the coverage requirement violates their religious freedom. For organizations who do not qualify for the exemption, but still do not want to provide coverage, the proposed rule would require them work with insurers to provide separate contraception c…
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…this year), Benedict prepared a statement on social networking platforms. Expressing again his deep anxiety about “authenticity” in the media age, Benedict warns that “the significance and effectiveness of the various forms of [online] expression appear to be determined more by their popularity than by their intrinsic importance and value.” One can imagine the pope wringing his hands in frustration at the lack of civility in online arguments about…
Read More…its members brutally beaten, by members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. The klansmen had expected to find Michael Schwerner, a field worker for the Congress of Racial Equality. Schwerner and two of his CORE colleagues—James Earle Chaney and Andrew Goodman—were actually in Ohio at the time, but heard of the Mt. Zion burning and came back to Mississippi to investigate. They were pulled over, arrested, released, tailed, and…
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…ady lived. Yes, this is literary drama. Yet what we have in the Spiritual Exercises is a textual practice minus the page: it is the individual life that forms the plot in question, to be read and edited; places that require improvement are to be marked; and the text re-read, a small dot made here, a nota bene there—and this process to be repeated again and again. The Exercises demand that the Jesuit remain attentive to the way in which the compone…
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…chisement moves, call out anti-tax conservatives on the racial/ethnic subtext of their anti-tax campaigns, attack America’s thoroughly racialized system of mass incarceration, support union representation drives that bring greater income and dignity to immigrant workers and all people of color, and take an active role in local and regional organizing to maintain adequate funding for schools and public colleges serving students of color and the chi…
Read More…e, the most important thing an individual can do. Let me just give you an example—this goes on year after year—Dr. Paul has been a consistent promoter of Second Amendment legislation. He’s already mentioned the United Nations, well, he’s got a bill to get us out of the United Nations, he doesn’t just talk about it. And the reason the Second Amendment folks are so interested in that is because the UN right now, under Hillary Clinton, the State Depa…
Read More…smatic persons will never be discovered embezzling money, enjoying kinky sex, or (The Da Vinci Code notwithstanding) fathering surprise children. It’s not necessary to label something a “cult” to understand the potential peril involved in looking to a living guru. However honest and virtuous that guru might be, she—like the rest of us—is susceptible to tripping and falling right up until the day she dies. What makes some folks willing and able to…
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