Religion Dispatches
…local concern that he wasn’t going to comment on, when he otherwise has (albeit in a perfunctory way) called for the promotion of women’s rights in other parts of the Middle East? And since Obama was promoting the rights and freedom of religious minorities last night, wouldn’t this case fall under his concern? There are good religion questions. They just don’t get asked….
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…ympathetic to the advertising. But we don’t take a position on this except promoting dialogue. At Sojourners, we’ve decided to have a safe place for dialogue and even disagreement on our staff and in our constituency. That’s interesting, since the Believe Out Loud ad could be best interpreted as . . . promoting dialogue. Sojourners, so far, has been silent on the Rev. Robert Chase’s piece we published here. In the court of public opinion Twitter,…
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…ld step of drawing down one million dollars from the Diocesan Endowment to promote the ‘no’ case,” he said. Davies told the gathering that “the stakes are high and the cost is high”. “Yet the cause is just and it is a consequence of our discipleship to uphold the gift of marriage as God has designed it — a creation ordinance for all people. By so doing, the wisdom of God is made manifest.” … “I believe that a change in the definition of marriage i…
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…ost. It is not only secular; its populations are increasingly agnostic and free-thinking. Italy remains Catholic for cultural and historical, rather than necessarily theological, reasons. North America also seems lost. American Catholics in increasingly large numbers part with the Vatican over precisely the issues one would expect: feminism and sexual ethics. Birth control and abortion are not only “litmus tests” for US Supreme Court justices; the…
Read More…e most destabilizing revolutions of all have been conducted in the name of freedom and enforced liberty. That’s precisely how the French Revolution, and Napoleon’s later stewardship of it, went awry. The reason that Napoleon is still such a vexed and vexing historical figure may be found here. He changed the map and he changed the political ideology of European politics. There was much in what he achieved to warrant our admiration: legal and polit…
Read More…’s Eryk Bagshaw: The Greens will use Phillip Ruddock’s review of religious freedoms to build momentum for an Australian bill of rights and with Labor’s support it could be put before a Senate inquiry as early as next year. The Coalition, the Greens and the Opposition will clash over religious freedoms when Parliament resumes in February after Treasurer Scott Morrison vowed to defend Christianity from discrimination following the passing of same-se…
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…diverse. Maybe these explorers did see people whom a modern American would code as white. Maybe not. As Robinson demonstrates in The Lost White Tribe, the better questions here have to do with the interpretation of bodies, not just with the bodies themselves. Basically: why were European and American adventurers so eager to find these far-flung white tribes in the first place? And they were eager. Reports of white Indians and white Africans made h…
Read More…s. The man with no religious record to speak of has virtually been given a free pass by his own party’s evangelical base—however lukewarm their support—and the man with a religious record of some depth has been paying for it on a regular basis. Senator Obama is faulted for going to the wrong churches, hearing the wrong sermons, possessing the wrong religious convictions. And all the while, John McCain, unquestionably a man who has sacrificed and s…
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…s history, the CHPP blames Israeli protesters and—again, using antisemitic code—their supposed “globalist” funders for dividing Israeli society. (To add to the irony, just last week U.S. evangelical groups railed against Netanyahu’s far-right government for authoring a bill that would limit Christian groups’ ability to proselytize in Israel. In response, Netanyahu froze the bill). This isn’t the first time Christian Zionists have condemned Jews wh…
Read More…54 had no legal ramifications: it was not a bill to change the state legal code, as was SB-1433. It also stipulated that the bill would not apply to in vitro fertilization. Well, if any legislators believed this would give them cover, they were mistaken. The pro-personhood folks made it known that a a representative would be bringing a procedural motion to force hearing on SB-1433. Oklahomans for Life sent this memo to house Republicans, stating t…
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