Religion Dispatches
…red to vote there.” Publishers Watching, But Are They Listening? While the code language in the science standards may be vague enough that perhaps writers like Miller can use them to their advantage, the social studies requirements are another story. Many warn that as goes Texas, so goes the nation, since publishers writing textbooks to adhere to Texas’ standards would sell the same or similar versions to other states as well. In response, People…
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…to make sure this predator was not around children. No one challenged the code of deference to those higher up and obedience to the rule of secrecy. Now we have “the largest institutional crisis in centuries, possibly in Church history,” declares the National Catholic Reporter in an editorial. The New York Times, which broke the story of abuse at the deaf school in Wisconsin, quotes a priest in Berlin as saying the crisis is “the worst in 100 yea…
Read More…ose either secretly or overtly a Taliban-like, religious, strict religious code upon all Americans, which is ridiculous.” Honor killings, forced marriages, female genital mutilation, and other abuses are “un-Islamic,” he said, adding that there is “no debate among serious Muslim scholars about that.” As far as fear-mongering that that Muslims seek to supplant the Constitution with shari’ah, Khan noted, “there is room for individual religious pract…
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…y teach us that when we do so, our lives will be richer and our characters better. At their root, the stories and teachings and injunctions of a religion aim to bring about a transformation in believers, one in which the believers’ lives are informed by a relational connection to an Ultimate Reality that transcends them. That, put simply, is what religion is about. It’s not about believing that talking snakes or flying horses are real—even if, som…
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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…
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…s as an attempt to destroy “the thick wall which we ourselves have erected between the transcendental world and the process of history, between ends and means.” Greenberg develops this idea—comparing Gandhi to the Buddhist ruler Asoka—and avoids any mention of Zionism. Rather, he sees Jewish religious parallels to Gandhi’s attempt to tie the spiritual to the political: Despite the long chronicle of suffering and humiliation in Jewish history, we…
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…eld said that “Gen. Boykin gave many in the field just the kind of warrior code they needed to fulfill their duties with moral passion.” In an extensive, and highly-documented, review of Mansfield’s Ten Tortured Words, Rodda, pointed out that the book was shot full of a series of historical errors and noted that “Mansfield makes David Barton, whose masterpiece of historical revisionism, Original Intent, is listed in the bibliography of Ten Torture…
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…dy for some serious War on Culture…er…culture war. So there’s Christian as code-word for ‘evangelical.’ Like when Republican politicians say it. And there’s Christian meaning Protestant, as opposed to Catholic. And there’s Christian the way a missionary might mean it, (as opposed to heathen?). And there are those “anonymous Christians,” or involuntary Christians…was that Rahner who devised that category? Does anyone outside of seminary or grad sch…
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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…, the repetition is easy to explain. They are locked up, they have nothing better to do, and they share only that one joke-book. But what explains the constant number-calling around homosexuality in so many American churches? Why do we rehearse arguments most anyone active in church has already heard dozens of time? Why do we behave like prisoners? I don’t think that long-term veterans of church debates have much hope that undecided people will be…
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