Religion Dispatches
…agency) issues a rule that requires any organization that offers the poor free meals to include meat on its menu, with the single exception of religious organizations that offer only coreligionists free meals. In the statement announcing the new requirement, the government points out that most people do eat meat, and that most doctors believe meat is good for you in the right amounts, since it provides important nutrients that are difficult to fi…
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…rmany, have only brought him more support. His party, the “Freie Wähler” (“Free Voters”), have noted a surge in the polls since the scandals broke. Asked to provide answers to a list of questions about the allegations by his party’s chairman and senior coalition partner, Markus Söder, his responses were so brazen that it seemed an embarrassment to Söder. In response to the first question, “Why were the flyers in your school bag?” Aiwanger’s writes…
Read More…The court concluded that PFL’s rights are not violated under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and it is still free to hate on birth control: All Plaintiffs must do to opt out is express what they believe and seek what they want via a letter or two-page form. That bit of paperwork is more straightforward and minimal than many that are staples of nonprofit organizations’ compliance with law in the modern administrative state. Religious nonprofi…
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…just laws wherever there is a Christian presence because ‘Until we are all free, we are none of us free.’” Anglican Communion: Gay couple’s church wedding expected to rile Communion’s conservatives The first wedding by a same-sex couple in an Anglican Church in Britain is expected to further exacerbate tensions within the Anglican Communion. Excerpts from The Guardian’s Cathering Pepinster reporting: The first gay Anglican wedding in Britain took…
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…: The Rise of the Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean For Our World (Free Press, 2009) and Ben Simpfendorfer’s intriguing The New Silk Road: How a Rising Arab World is Turning Away from the West and Rediscovering China (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009). The Wide Green Smudge Simpfendorfer, fluent in Arabic and Chinese, is Chief China Economist at Royal Bank of Scotland, and has lived throughout the Middle East. He brings a casual language that make…
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…ess creativity of the universe and the objective validity of human rights. Promoting and accepting religious images as universal will help heal culture war divisions and promote the formation of a broad-based progressive coalition. Frederick Clarkson: Thanks for hosting this discussion, Linell. I think these matters are integral to the functioning, the advance, and indeed the survival of Constitutional democracy. But I think that in order to give…
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…d technology, such thinking went, humanity would be able to create a world free from want, disease, ignorance, and inequality—maybe even from death itself. Christian theologians like Edward Schillebeeckz, Johann Baptist Metz, and Jürgen Moltmann began to question the revived myth of human progress embedded in this futurological view. How, they asked, does a future that arises solely out of present circumstances produce anything other than more of…
Read More…one agrees with him or not is beside the point. Anti-choice Catholics are free to argue goals and strategies, and a religion publication is free to host parts of that conversation. This is about context and consistency. It’s about the fact that Dolan’s piece is, in more than one way, suggestive of the very favoritism that Jones and Russell-Kraft document. First off, there’s history here between Rev. Reese and the Catholic hierarchy. Reese was onc…
Read More…ences such as radical gay sex education being taught in school, threats to freedom of speech and freedom of religion.” At Crikey, Amy Coopes responds to critics within the LGBT movement who dismiss the marriage equality movement as a form of assimilationism: Some in the Yes camp wish to paint this as, quite simply, a question about amending the Marriage Act to allow two consenting adults to marry, and in a sense, of course, that is true. But as wi…
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…Hobby Lobby—where the Court noted that even if women could not obtain cost-free contraception coverage through their employer’s health plan, they could still purchase contraception—unaccompanied immigrant children in custody don’t have that freedom. In addition, Hamilton said, “rape is different” from access to contraception. “Courts have not had a chance to do the weighing of a victim of sexual assault versus the religious claims of an organizati…
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