Religion Dispatches
…wner. At the most pragmatic level, the entire narrative of Jim’s quest for freedom is an exercise in redundancy. There are no lessons for liberation here. What may be most useful about reading, carefully reading, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn today is the deep skepticism that the book expresses about turning to the past for examples of virtue. Twain understood the pleasures that his readers took in a history that was more mythic than actual,…
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…the two key issues at stake in its signing: First Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion and to free speech: I am very pleased to be signing this bill into law. The graves of our veterans are hallowed ground. And obviously we all defend our Constitution and the First Amendment and free speech, but we also believe that when men and women die in the service of their country and are laid to rest, it should be done with the utmost honor an…
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…might, right and white privilege. Reagan truly believed that his notion of freedom—democracy, free markets and religious liberty—was God’s plan for America. He also believed that America was God’s tool for spreading freedom worldwide. In the years following his presidency, his vision was enacted through domestic and foreign policy. Welfare reform, trade agreements, and the War on Terror may have seemed to further neoliberal or neoconservative aims…
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…ve found another way. The solution is that no one is entitled to religious freedom because there is no such thing as religious freedom. Straining Credulity On what grounds could we conclude that the man in the pasta strainer deserves less deference from the state than the woman in the hijab or the man in the kippa? Is it that their faiths are “real,” and his fake? There are two ways that the state could judge that a faith is real as opposed to fak…
Read More…imed at limiting the free distribution of Israel Hayom (Israel Today), the free newspaper owned by American casino magnate and Republican super-funder Sheldon Adelson. The same Sheldon Adelson who, at the inaugural meeting of the Israeli American Council in Washington on Sunday, said, “I don’t like journalism.” Haaretz’s Anshel Pfeffer explains the anti-Adelson bill that advanced today: The law, proposed by MK Eitan Cabel (Knesset) and sponsored b…
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…of the city’s Tibetan refugee settlement, personalizing the struggle for Tibet’s freedom. “If I’m not doing anything, I shouldn’t call myself a Tibetan,” the young people told Raha. While uprisings in Tibet in the late 1980s inspired international solidarity movements among young Westerners, recent protests inside Tibet have galvanized a new generation of activists within the refugee community [See here for RD’s previous coverage]. The young refug…
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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…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…
Read More…that. Indeed the Republican Party’s official position is that the balance between promoting free exercise of religion and prohibiting religious tests for office “has been distorted by judicial rulings which attempt to drive faith out of the public arena.” What would be an appropriate public expression of faith in the public square? In the Republican Party platform, public display of the Ten Commandments and student-led prayer in public schools, b…
Read More…ligious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Free Exercise, Establishment, and Free Speech Clausees of the First Amendment. On the RFRA claim—one that conservative opponents of the HHS rule have portrayed as more or less open and shut—the judge ruled that the coverage requirement does not “substantially burden” (the relevant legal standard) O’Brien’s religious practice: Frank O’Brien is not prevented from keeping the Sabbath, from providing a religiou…
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