Religion Dispatches
…your mortgage does NOT have to be paid off in order to go. People get confused by this, because one of the pre-conditions is that one must be debt-free. That doesn’t mean I don’t have an amount due against my credit card (or my mortgage, if I still had one), but it means I have keep my payments up in accordance to my agreements. No overdue amounts. I’ve done my mock packing. What is mock packing, you ask? Well, for this trip I have almost all new…
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…dy else. And when it concerns science and technology, the more you do, the better. Morphological freedom is an attractive concept, and I agree that we should be open to thinking about new relationships between technology and humanity. Personally I don’t believe that there’s any one morally correct way to be human, or that technology is essentially good or evil, but many critics of transhumanism, I think, fear that technology will alter some vision…
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…put it, strong. I was surprised to learn that, during the first Gulf War, Betty Aberlin and Fred Rogers had a fairly serious dispute over how to make best use of the platform they had to address the peace they both longed for—with Aberlin wanting to take a much more radical stand. Aberlin appealed to her Christian convictions, as Rogers elsewhere did to his. Was that a big surprise to you as well? The dispute between Aberlin and Rogers did not su…
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…ets and advertisers all play with the tensions, conflicts and frustrations between black and white people. They use racial antagonism to boost ratings, to draw attention to their products and to keep viewers. We are constantly afflicted by the media with yet another “conversation” between opposing racial viewpoints that yields no light and generates no new ideas. Its only purpose is to increase our consumptive desire for more such interactions. We…
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…rchasing power and capital goods orders. While conservatives frequently accused these programs of being useless “make-work,” a waste of taxpayers’ money, the reality is just the opposite. Useful work which would not otherwise have been done literally changed the face of the country and provided a lasting legacy. Workers built and repaired 1 million miles of roads and 200,000 public facilities—including schools, playgrounds, courthouses, parks and…
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…merican spiritual traditions meant, at best, affirming a moral equivalency between enslaved and free persons, so as to disavow the notion that oppressed people’s spiritual traditions were superior in value to the religious faiths of human traffickers. Take Hebrew Israelism, for example, the primary spiritual tradition embraced by the authors of this article. When writers outside of our community add the unique problem of ortho-ethnicity (right peo…
Read More…events.” In January 2009, principal Frank Lay and athletic director Robert Freeman were accused of violating the consent decree when “Lay asked Freeman to offer a prayer of blessing during a school-day luncheon for the dedication of a new field house at Pace High School. “Freeman complied with the request and offered the prayer at the event. It appears this was a school-sponsored event attended by students, faculty and community members.” In respo…
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…th states held that there was no violation of the First Amendment right to free exercise of religion. That’s because the law doesn’t “substantially burden” anyone’s religious practice and is one of general applicability that was not targeted at infringing a particular religious practice. To permit religious beliefs to “excuse compliance with otherwise valid laws regulating matters the state is free to regulate,” would, the California Supreme Cour…
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…log post titled “Israel’s political striptease show.” Drawing a comparison between Netanyahu’s opposition and German Jews who supposedly allowed the Holocaust to happen because they were too “busy insulting each other [and] drunk on the wine of pride,” his underlying message is that Jews who resist Israel’s far-right agenda—even in the slightest—constitute one of the greatest existential threats to the Jewish people themselves. To some prominent C…
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…deranged rose ceremony that has become the announcement of a new nominee isn’t just selling their soul to an authoritarian devil, they’re signing it over on camera, for all to see. No principled jurist would accept this nomination. No honest or honorable justice could. The Republicans may not be better than this unseemly, unprincipled exploitation of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, but the next justice must be better. Any nominee Trump approa…
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