Religion Dispatches
…xample, did you know that the Cordoba Initiative sent election monitors to Sudan, and Bin Laden was once believed to have been in Sudan? It is a game that trades in absurdity and conspiracy theories. The other approach is to take quotes out of context and use them to prove that the speaker or author is duplicitous. The term for that is now “Sherroding.” Then, finally, is the ever popular and constant smearcasting, where one just hurls mud and hope…
Read More…mer athletes of color who had a positive experience with BYU and the Honor Code: “If Darron Smith wasn’t so hell bent on exposing BYU, the Church and the honor code office as racists, he’d find out that for every Thomas Stancil, Tico Pringle and Ray Hudson, there’s a Brandon Davies, Reno Mahe and Brian McDonald, the latter of which recovered from an alcohol-related probation, joined the Church and served a mission to Washington, DC.” Sikahema’s fu…
Read More…institutions like the 1788 Constitution, the presidency, and the military code of honor. But at what costs do we maintain a revered institution like the military code of honor? Holocaust levels of genocide threaten the Syrian Kurds. Why isn’t the prospect of mass murder enough to make Mattis reconsider the politics of personal honor? If that grim prospect is not enough, what is? Mattis’ deferral to presidential rights, for instance, should challe…
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In Amsterdam in 1709, philosopher John Toland set his eyes upon a remarkable manuscript—what he described in Nazarenus as “a Mahometan [i.e., Muslim] Gospel, never before publicly made known among Christians.” Associated with the apostle Barnabas, the text essentially retold the life of Jesus in terms familiar from the New Testament, but with some major departures. It contended that Jesus denied his divine status; that he had predicted the coming…
Read More…, and in what manner to express or not express these rights. It’s when the code that translates these rights for us somehow ceases to function properly in the background that problems result. I want to suggest that often when problems crop up around religious or religiously-motivated speech in the United States, they often have less to do with rights per se than with the unwritten code that determines how these rights are to be taken. At least tha…
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…ement policies in respective regions or countries, and develop programs to promote religious freedom.” But given Brownback’s history of using “religious freedom” as a sword to discriminate against LGBT people, his nomination offers the strongest evidence yet that, when the Trump administration talks about “religious freedom,” it actually means “Christian supremacy.” Though Brownback an equal-opportunity excluder: the Council on American-Islamic Re…
Read More…positive depictions of LGBT lives. The MDA Free to Air Television Program Code states that “music associated with drugs, alternative lifestyles (e.g. homosexuality) or the worship of the occult or the devil should not be broadcast.” The Free to Air Radio Program Code says “information, themes or subplots on lifestyles such as homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexualism, transsexualism, transvestism, paedophilia and incest should be treated with utmost…
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…interests, for some this incident revealed that the people controlling the code have a lot of power. If one thinks that marketing agents put “Bible” in the code, then they might think of them as predatory, or presumptuous about U.S. Christians and their political affiliations. They might become angry that companies have such power in shaping the public’s perception of Christianity and, indeed, in shaping Christians’ own ideas about their communiti…
Read More…ion as seen in last year’s rally against revising Article 972 of the Civil Code to change the term “man and woman” to “two parties” in the article concerning marriage and the term “father and mother” to “parents” in the Civil Code. Philippines: Anti-Discrimination Ordinance Passes Quezon City Council The city council of Quezon City unanimously approved an anti-discrimination ordinance this week, expanding a law from 2003 that banned anti-gay housi…
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…inciple that imagining creates reality has captivated modern readers,” the promo copy explains. The publisher probably didn’t expect the book to resonate quite so uncomfortably with the political moment when they chose November 8th—Election Day—as its publication date. But indeed, Donald Trump’s distinctive style has roots in the spiritual tradition of which At Your Command and The Secret are both a part. Neville was just ahead of his time. Born i…
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