Religion Dispatches
…bout promoting tobacco in countries which had no or few regulations on the promotion or use of tobacco products. In fact, the documents show that this was the clear objective of American tobacco companies who were facing declining sales at home due to increased government regulations and scrutiny. Romney has spoken of his personal disdain for tobacco, revealing that in his entire life he smoked only one cigarette—when he was a teenager. Growing up…
Read More…to me it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use to—to use their religion to hurt others. It’s simply a factual statement followed by an anodyne opinion. I don’t think people should use their religion to hurt others, either. Does that make me a bigot? The broader point here is that Kennedy’s reasoning is simply incoherent. There is no way for government to remain “strictly neutral” when it comes to religious values. B…
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…th-based institutions explicitly subject” to California non-discrimination codes. Of course, that’s because non-faith-based institutions are already subject to the state and federal anti-discrimination laws. “The targets of this bill are religious colleges and universities, but the true victims of this legislation would be the innocent students,” wrote California Assemblyman Matthew Harper early last month. Since the anti-discrimination requiremen…
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…humanity itself. Brown not only claims that the Pope didn’t specifically use the words “gay marriage,” he says that there wasn’t even the suggestion “that gay marriage was the most important of these [policies that threaten the family] and he didn’t mention it at all.” Really? Immediately following his naming of the family as the most important setting for the education of young people, the pope defines family as being “based on the marriage of…
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…r telling time and making measurements by the sun or stars. You could even use it to calculate the circumference of the earth, which Gerbert and his peers knew very well was not flat like a disc but round as an apple. Much of this science Gerbert learned as a youth living on the border of Islamic Spain, then an extraordinarily tolerant culture in which learning was prized. Born a peasant in the mountains of France in the mid-900s, Gerbert entered…
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…‘elder brother’—Esau—is also the brother who gets rejected. One can still use it, because it expresses an important point. But it is true that they are also our ‘fathers in the faith.’ And this way of putting it illustrates perhaps even more clearly the character of our relationship to each other. Still, in regard to what may be the most contentious issue of all—the beatification process for Pope Pius XII, who reigned during the Holocaust—Benedic…
Read More…nsubstantiated claims such as “when you give money to groups that not only promote contraception but also promote abortion in an integrated way, you actually drive abortion rates up, not down.” Since 2000, Alvaré has taught law and brought her own brand of cherry-picked data tendentiously linked to the supposed dangers of abortion and contraception wrapped up as concern for women’s health and well-being to the Robert George/Witherspoon Institute/N…
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…ing to us. Or when someone skips the middle books of the Old Testament because they’re long and boring…” Here pauses. “Granted, Numbers is like…” “I like Numbers, but anyway…” mumbles Caleb. “The real impetus for the game,” Thomas resumes, “is to get people to engage in Scripture and read stories they’ve never read before. When a concubine is cut up into twelve pieces, that imagery is really offensive. But a lot of people didn’t even know that sto…
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…ort the historic aims of the ABS in being an organization central to the cause of making America a Christian nation. While always willing to work with anyone interested in Bible promotion, the ABS, as Fea explains, “has always gravitated towards the particular expression of Christianity that its board and staff believed to be the moral guardians of America’s status as a Christian nation.” A particularly fascinating narrative line of the book is ab…
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…whose policies would be anathema in American civil discourse. Is dying because America needs to keep its allies happy better than dying because you’re in the wrong religion, or pray in the wrong way? I don’t know, but I don’t imagine it makes all that difference. I imagine it wouldn’t to you, either, if your loved ones were being killed, oppressed, dispossessed and so on and so forth. That our victims are largely Muslim is important, but not centr…
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