Religion Dispatches
…, although we might see a glimmer of hope in the fact that respondents aged 18-24 were much less supportive of the law, along with residents of Moscow. (Specific percentages for these demographics were not in the publicly available Levada Center write-up, so we’ll have to make do with these generalities.) I’m not sure what might motivate American “liberals” to dismiss what’s happening in Russia. For my own part, I’m more likely to encounter this…
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…l, therefore, sets an absolutist dichotomy that leaves no room for the give-and-take that is at the heart of deliberative democracy. It is here that churches can contribute to the debate. As de Tocqueville observed, by generating spaces of social engagement and dissent, religious congregations have been central to the development of a robust civil society in the United States. This has been particularly the case for sectors of society that have be…
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…ollowing the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision, which legalized same-sex marriage across the country, the conservative magazine National Review published an essay by the talk-show host (and Trump supporter) Dennis Prager headlined, “The Court Follows Its Heart and Completes the Secularization of America.” Completes the secularization of America? That was fast. The men who lead the Christian Right seem to have a poor sense of history and pol…
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…oundation, birth control comprises between 30 and 44 percent of women’s out-of-pocket health care spending. For marginalized groups, the impact is likely to be especially severe because funding for the contraceptive safety-net provider, Planned Parenthood, is also under attack. But the biggest effect is likely to be felt on access to the “LARCs” (long-acting reversible contraceptives) like IUDs and implants, since they are the most expensive. The…
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…nding clients for lap dances, but still must make money to support her nine-year-old child. (Slyly, A.O. Scott’s New York Times review ends with a note on its “R” rating since, “It has fake bloodshed and real nudity”: This difference is crucial.) Cassidy and Randy each work double lives, between their bodies as commodities and their bodies that have to pay the rent and support their children. Somewhere in all the meat are identities, struggling fo…
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…ternational Religious Freedom, when Robert Jeffress is the poisonous voice sanctifying the American embassy’s relocation in Israel, when the Vice President of the United States understands Christianity as a “get out of jail free” card used to freely exercise open bigotry, it can seem pretty conclusive that power has prevailed over justice. But consider some other words of Daniel Berrigan’s: “Redeem the times! The times are inexpressibly evil. Chri…
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…your chances of winning—and you should. This country is basically a center-right to center-left country and if we could rotate a competent center-right with a competent-center left person then I think we’d have a healthy country. I think your book could help people make a critical assessment of how religion is being used in politics because if they understood the Bible then they would recognize when it’s being misused and abused. It seems to me…
Read More…s best novel (most critics demur). This long picaresque work, serialized in 1843 and 1844, is savagely satirical as nothing else in the Dickens ouvre. Mr. Pecksniff is introduced early on as a fundamentally crooked person, rotten at the core, but rather interesting on that account. A supposed architect and teacher of architecture, Pecksniff is adept at flimflamming prospective students (and their parents) into paying exorbitant fees to board at hi…
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…y al-Qaeda and South Asian Muslim militant organizations, including Laskkar-e-Taiba, as the most commonly mentioned. The Indian press has also blamed national and local security forces for not preventing the attacks, or responding quickly and effectively enough. A previously unknown group calling itself the “Deccan Mujahedeen” sent e-mails to Indian media claiming responsibility and explaining that their goal was to “Indianize” the war against Ame…
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…. One of the arguments of the book is that what Luther did for religion vis-à-vis the Catholic Church at the time was to privatize and deregulate and decentralize it. Those three principles, of course, are what eventually becomes neo-liberal economics. The Reformation was a product of and promoted a communications revolution in terms of print. Conservative Protestants have always been the first to understand the significance of new technologies. I…
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