Religion Dispatches
…o do anything about it. The agency has several statutes that it could have used to regulate the ritual use of mercury inside homes, most importantly the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, which allows the agency to take a wide variety of regulatory actions against substances that pose an unreasonable risk to the environment or public health. To look into the issue, the EPA established a task force that conducted research and interviewed intere…
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…e of guns that non-gun-owners often forget: They’re fun. They’re owned and used largely for sport. And when they’re not being used, guns can be fondled for the pure pleasure of it. The fun aspect, too, is largely seen as a “guy thing,” even when the gun owners are women. Teddy Roosevelt knew all this very well when he led his well-armed Rough Riders up San Juan hill, and when he sent the Great White Fleet—sixteen battleships armed with huge protr…
Read More…oms, with several parents challenging schools who let transgender children use the restroom of their choice, because they don’t want to have to explain to their kids why Brenda is now Johnnie. This upsets the whole applecart about fixed gender identities as well as traditional male and female sexual and culture roles. It’s not hard to understand how the more public emergence of transgender people is upsetting to more traditionally minded people, e…
Read More…it occurs. And since our particular context is not conducive to marijuana use, marijuana use would be “foolish” within it. Crouch explains: In our North American context, what is the function of pot? It is associated with superficially pleasant disengagement from the world. It connotes a kind of indolence and “tuning out” that is not an option for people who want to become agents of compassion and neighbor love, not to mention its association wit…
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…political analysts have suggested, the religious fervor behind these riots and acts of vandalism is likely stoked by purely political concerns. That the leading Islamic political party in Malaysia claims that Muslims may be confused by the Christian use of the word is evidence of their own ignorance of the Qur’an’s position on the subject and indicates their interest in dividing the Malaysian population along religious lines for their own politic…
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…o many gay men affected by the AIDS crisis. I left this discussion out because, again, it took away from the cohesion of the book as a whole. And with all the recent debates about PrEP (a pill that can be used to prevent HIV transmission) and gay marriage, I felt there were more pressing issues to engage—okay, and I figured maybe the plays were best left to theatre historians and performance theorists. What are some of the biggest misconceptions a…
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…needs. Connecting to their faith and their communities is enhanced by the use of technology. As in numerous of examples of a thoughtful, temperate use of technology, knee-jerk unplugging can, in fact, disconnect people from important relational and spiritual experiences. Indeed, as I noted in a recent article here on RD, for believers and non-believers alike there is a strong correlation between technological engagement and civic or spiritual en…
Read More…inty, is all. It is not at all clear that liberals and progressives cannot use the language of evil, of course; they simply call different things by that name. More to the point, the thoughtful use of the language of evil is subtly related to another concept, that of sacred value. Torture is deemed evil, precisely because it violates the sacred value of the individual human person. Terror and other forms of indiscriminate violence are evil for sim…
Read More…ry of history”: Almighty God documents a history of meaning making and the use of those meanings to regulate bodies and identities: how Roman Catholics and Protestants looked to their respective traditions to understand marriage and race; how they “knew” their beliefs and their interpretations of texts to be correct; how those beliefs were subsequently encoded into laws that regulated human behaviors; and even how love has been, and continues to b…
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…must not let a few bishops at the top hinder the global effort simply because they continue to fight change within the Church. In 2010, the Pope made an important first step in a journey that the leaders in the Church must make towards a compassionate, realistic view of safer sex and condom use. Like any voyage, the first step is the hardest, but those of us in the Church hope and pray that our leaders will have the courage to undertake this pil…
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