Religion Dispatches
…ions, arguing that “Several recent incidences of violent extremists in the United States who are committed to fighting here and abroad have underscored the threat to the United States and our interests posed by individuals radicalized at home. Our best defenses against this threat are well informed and equipped families, local communities, and institutions.” This statement comes under the heading of countering radicalization. While I have no doubt…
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…ly reported atrocities, adding: In late June, a contractor working for the United Nations witnessed Sudanese Army soldiers filling a grave with bodies and covering it with a bulldozer. The Sudanese Army, paramilitary forces and government security forces have also attacked the United Nations force itself, the report said, including the summary execution of a Sudanese staff member. The report, which was requested by the Security Council, recommends…
Read More…ributions of Muslims to the building of modern Western nations such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and France are just as important. It was U.S. Muslim writers and thinkers such as Mahommah Baquaqua and Mohammed Ali ben Said, who also served in the Massachusetts 55th (Colored) Infantry during the Civil War, that gave American readers some of their first accurate accounts of African cultures. North Carolinian Omar ibn Said penned the fir…
Read More…tical home that tracks with the teaching of the church: Simply put, in the United States there is no “Catholic party” that could faithfully reflect the Church’s positions on the wide array of policy issues related to the Church’s teachings. We can imagine a party that opposes abortion and euthanasia while also opposing the death penalty and pre-emptive war. Or one that calls for tuition tax credits for parochial schools and also for more aggressiv…
Read More…s and the planet, I need to tell a story beyond the victim story about the United States and its privatized and outsourced hopes for its own air and water, unconnected to that of others. I feel right now that I need to make common cause with every sensible Republican I can find. And with China. And with California. And speaking of the unlikeliest allies, perhaps even someone like ex-Exxon Rex Tillerson can help the President move into a more globa…
Read More…a of the West as a “Judeo-Christian civilization” comes primarily from the United States, although important Christian conservatives from continental Europe also subscribed to it. It was fundamentally an anti-totalitarian idea: both Communism and Nazism were seen as threats to the religious values on which the West was understood to be built. In this way, the idea of Judeo-Christian civilization became an anti-Communist ideology during the Cold Wa…
Read More…state shrinks right up to nothing when liability lurks. In early 2014, the United Nations’ Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which monitors implementation of that Convention, questioned Vatican officials about sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic clergy and its systematic cover-up by church officials. Former sex crimes prosecutor for the Church, Monsignor Charles Scicluna, in watershed testimony, admitted that the Vatican bore some respo…
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…nation and I’ve known John Dorhauer, President and General Minister of the United Church of Christ, for a long time. But Dorhauer posted what I thought was perhaps the strongest response to Trump’s election so far: Because this election sharply separated us over matters of race, gender, human sexuality, faith, economic inequality and political persuasions we all bear a heavy burden moving forward. It is our call, our shared mission, to heed the ca…
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…ury. Although the separation of church and state has been a feature of the United States since its founding, the principle initially applied to the federal level and was more narrowly focused on institutions. By the mid-twentieth century its application had expanded considerably, and it was invoked to legitimate a broadly encompassing separation of religion from a secularized public life. This shift was most directly attributable to a series of Su…
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…America, dissevered and divorced.” Though the Church had prospered in the United States, he lamented, it would be better off if it “enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.” The notion that non-establishment might truly be in the best interest of both sides of the church/state divide was a core tenet of the Americanist heresy. The accused bishops for the most part denied they were guilty of any offense, and in time…
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