Religion Dispatches
…olics in Alliance for the Common Good. According to a Faith in Public Life news release, the topics explored in the new survey include: • Candidate friendliness to religion • The impact of Sarah Palin’s nomination on evangelical voters • Support for a broader values agenda • Attitudes toward a common ground approach on abortion • Voting issue priorities • Beliefs about causes of the economic crisis Go here for complete results. ++++++++++ Rev. Moo…
Read More…ife Group members to become mentors themselves, and finally disciple other new converts. Religion scholar Alan Wolfe at The New Republic‘s Plank blog imagined Palin’s religion a libertarian-infused Western evangelicalism: toting guns, having taken drugs once, naming two children after witches, vetoing a ban on domestic benefits to gay couples. These were things Wolfe imagined could complicate her reputation with more straight-laced Southern Baptis…
Read More…al healing practices appear to be protected under one part of the criminal code but not under another) violates their right to due process of law. Wisconsin’s “treatment through prayer” provision is not unique: More than thirty other states offer similar kinds of apparent legal protections for devout parents who reject medicine and turn to prayer when their children are ailing. A number of groups have lobbied for the repeal of such religious exemp…
Read More…nia pastor instrumental in the California Proposition 8 fight who now runs Newt Gingrich’s Renewing American Leadership, and Harry Jackson, who relentlessly opposed D.C.’s gay marriage law; religious right historian David Barton; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council; Rod Parsley, who, like John Hagee, is apparently making a comeback after being rejected by McCain in 2008; Jerry Boykin, the…
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…attacked by Rush Limbaugh on his radio show. “It’s like being gummed by a newt. It doesn’t actually hurt but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle.” Which pretty much sums up my response to David Klinghoffer’s post, “Dear Lauri Lebo, Please Help Me Understand Your Conspiracy Theory,” in which he impugns both my intelligence and my understanding of the controversies I write about. But then it occurred to me that next month marks the five-ye…
Read More…ooklet’s content isn’t religious: This may be the first nonreligious moral code based wholly on common sense. It was written by L. Ron Hubbard as an individual work and it not part of any religious doctrine. Any reprinting or individual distribution of it does not infer connection with or sponsorship of any religious organization. It is therefore admissible for government departments and employees to distribute it as a nonreligious activity. (Repr…
Read More…venues, the Black Cap pub, paying public tribute to “the drag queens of Stonewall.” Pink News reviews the LGBT stances of Northern Ireland’s political parties on LGBT issues and so-called “conscience clause” legislation, noting that North Ireland is the only part of the UK without marriage equality. Naith Payton writes that the largest, the Democratic Unionist Party, “has not mentioned LGBT issues at all in their manifesto.” They have historically…
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…fic antisemites and racists that we start to shut down when presented with new ones. QAnon, for example, has become so deeply ingrained in far-right discourse—and, more disturbingly, in conventional Republican rhetoric—that we tend to just move past it. Not because the damage is healed: as Jesselynn Cook details in her new book, The Quiet Damage, QAnon has ripped apart families and left lasting scars. And not because, post-Q, the beliefs have gone…
Read More…comprehensive affect of their mutual intellectual cooperation. This bred a new paradigm, for the time (which some mistakenly think we need to revert to in order to go forward at this juncture in history). Yeah, I know you know the bylines about Islamic philosophers who revived, preserved, and further developed Aristotelian and Hellenistic philosophical traditions; or about Arab and Muslim medical treatises that led the world until modern medicine;…
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…ot points out, philosophy in the ancient world was not so much a system or code as “a way of being.” Philosophy, in this sense, is enmeshed in a life-world. Writers from Marcus Aurelius to Francis Bacon to Ralph Waldo Emerson have conducted such experiments in living as spiritual exercise, a task that entailed writing as philosophic engagement. Philosophy in this mode, Hadot explains, is a continuous process, to be renewed in each instant—a practi…
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