Religion Dispatches
…litical zone larger now than ever before. The Modern West’s allegedly life-promoting institutions, precisely because of their excessive materialism, actually foster death. This is not a superficial analysis or critique, and there is much in it that a progressive secularist could agree with. Feminism and sexual ethics frame the issues where the two sides necessarily part company. It is important to recall that Catholic anti-Modernism is not new; it…
Read More…eved to warrant our admiration: legal and political reform (the Napoleonic Code), emphasis on good governance, egalitarian virtue, human rights, and the like. If Napoleon was an emperor, then he was an emperor unlike any other before him. In short, he was a revolutionary, intent on exporting his version of revolution and disrupting the old order of elite European privilege. Those most opposed to him were the most entrenched political powers of the…
Read More…er judged a vehicle for courting the religious right in psalmic and hymnic code, Palin is delivering a very clear message to religion-savvy listeners, who hear in her call for “servant’s hearts” the message of twenty years’ worth of “complementarian” sermons, exhorting Christians to be “servant-leaders” and, among women, to view their highest calling in service to male leadership: willing helpmeets to their husbands’, fathers’ and pastors’ authori…
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…nt as ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43QTjFCPLtI Nike has failed to promote justice for workers for decades. In 1997 filmmaker Michael Moore lambasted Nike CEO Phil Knight in “The Big One” for allowing young teenage girls to produce Nike sneakers in Indonesian sweatshops. About a decade later social justice educators Jim Keady and Leslie Kretzu travelled to Indonesia to live on Nike’s starvation wages for a month. Their documentary “Behind…
Read More…from Wikipedia). New Testament scholars have noted that since The DaVinci Code became a cultural phenomenon, there’s been a surge of conspiratorial claims about Jesus, the early church, and the influence of Pagan mystery religions. Authors such as Craig Evans and Bart Ehrman have written with bewilderment at the revival of “mythicist” theories of Jesus and “nineteenth-century philosophical hokum” that was long ago dismissed by serious scholars wh…
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…an political class is ashamed of it.” Tanzania: Government cracks down on ‘promoting gayism’ At BuzzFeed, Edith Honan reviews the country’s crackdown on LGBT people and any groups deemed to be “promoting gayism” and the consequent threat to public health. Gay sex has been a crime in Tanzania, punishable with life in prison, since British colonial rule, but there is no record of anyone serving serious time for it. LGBT Tanzanians have always been a…
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…es. And for anyone who thinks that it’s a big breakthrough for the pope to promote “responsible parenthood,” here’s Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae: Married love, therefore, requires of husband and wife the full awareness of their obligations in the matter of responsible parenthood, which today, rightly enough, is much insisted upon, but which at the same time should be rightly understood. Thus, we do well to consider responsible parenthood in the l…
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…o way that can be achieved without “entitlement reform,” which is Peterson code for cutting Social Security. Here lies madness. Here lies spare change you can’t believe in. Here lies a failure of nerve of colossal proportions. The New York Times reported the Obama deficit-reduction plan on the same Sunday front page where it also reported how Japanese consumers remain so traumatized by the devastation of their 1990s “lost decade” that they still r…
Read More…h Christian faith. You talked loud about giving more funding to religious (code-word Christian) organizations performing social services and backed it up with little real money. (David Kuo opened my eyes to this.) This is just one example of the way you wooed Christians with good rhetoric and failed to fulfill your promises. Using religious faith as a political tool is what history’s villians have done, and I am afraid you may be closer to that th…
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…ience, Equality.” Turning Point’s video suggests that the church’s program promotes “disunity” and “segregation.” But here too, there’s no evidence to support the claim, and plenty that refutes it. As Edgerton told the Chicago Sun Times, “You don’t fast from things that are despicable. … You don’t fast from things that are ugly,” he said. “You fast from those things that do tug at your heart.” Edgerton told the paper that although they’re celebrat…
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