Religion Dispatches
…Senate is not in session, a significant question in the early years of the Republic when the Senate only met for about half the year. The relevant constitutional clause reads as follows: The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session. Not surprisingly, most of the interpretive quarreling has concerned two of the cap…
Read More…ul, it helps to read Judith Shulevitz’s recent, excellent piece at the New Republic, “This Is How You Should Talk to a Climate-Change Denier.” Shulevitz, drawing on the work of psychologist Daniel Kahneman, makes the seemingly obvious point that human decision making and risk assessment aren’t especially rational. Simply put: scientific facts do not, as a rule, sway science denialists. That’s the whole problem, right? Shulevitz goes on to point ou…
Read More
…ggie Gallagher—who also worked with the National Fatherhood Initiative—“to promote marriage”; and “gave money to writer Mike McManus to support marriage promotion, while also giving money to McManus’ organization, Marriage Savers (‘a ministry that equips … local congregations to prepare for lifelong marriages …’).” Horn was, coincidentally, a founding board member of Marriage Savers. In addition to the NFI grants, in 2006 the organization received…
Read More
…mself half-Christian by birth. But it is just this kind of complexity that Republican promoters of anti-Arab bias seek to simplify. As shocked as many Americans were to learn of Khalidi’s scapegoating, the Republicans’ choice could not have been more perfect. Not because the professor heads up a research center at Columbia that has been the target of criticism by conservative education activists, anxious about how Middle Eastern studies is taught…
Read More
…ns believed the only hope was a purely Turkish, or at least purely Muslim, republic, a heartland secure from minorities who could be leveraged by foreign powers which, in the name of a common faith (Christianity), would further harm a vulnerable people. All of this is true, and yet has nothing to do with Armenians themselves. We have a principle in Islam, rooted in the Qur’an: ‘No bearer of burdens can bear the burden of another.’ The innocent can…
Read More…there, candidate Trump moved through the fairly customary laundry list of Republican talking points—school choice, Hillary’s emails, the secret plan to defeat ISIS, the need for a conservative to appoint the Scalia replacement, Hillary’s responsibility for North Korea’s nukes, and so on and on. By comparison with his summer addresses to campaign crowds, bent on attacking fire marshals and Gold Star mothers, sticking to the teleprompter appeared t…
Read More…he right have hysterically compared these calls to McCarthyism. At The New Republic, Brian Beutler observes how conservatives angered by Eich’s resignation have failed to adjust to a “transfer of privilege,” specifically that their anti-gay views are now (to them, abruptly) out of favor (in Silicon Valley at least, if not at A&E.) And, Beutler goes on, these conservative complainers have failed to notice their own double standard. “Yesterday,” Beu…
Read More
…without freedom to think and believe, you could not have the other two. A republic could not work if government and church officials (what Jefferson referred to as an alliance of “kings, nobles, and priests”) were trying to control what we think or prescribe what was the “best” religion or which people were the “best” citizens based upon their religious beliefs. If people were to make informed political choices themselves, they had to be free to…
Read More
…t an extensive spiritual and material network surrounding them. The Cercle promoted something they called “the Idea.” What was that? Neither the Cercle Harmonique nor the spirits they communicated with formally defined “the Idea,” but references to the Idea permeate their séance records. The Idea was a reformulation of the French revolutionary cry for liberté, égalité, fraternité. The Idea meant egalitarianism, equality and brotherhood. It was the…
Read More
…. The stated goal of the Constitution Party is to reestablish America as a Republic organized around biblical principles and under the authority of Jesus Christ. An examination of the Constitution Party platform shows clearly the influence of this movement advocating not only positions on numerous issues that have long been developed and promoted by Rushdoony and his followers, but doing so in terms of the reasoning put forth by Reconstructionists…
Read More