Religion Dispatches
…ht. The bill will go into effect immediately and employees will be able to sign up for the benefits by next Spring. This news from Chattanooga is especially striking a few reasons. First, the city has come very far, very fast. Chattanooga does lean Democrat, in no small part because it’s 35% African-American. But as anyone familiar with Southern politics can tell you, a city of Southern Democrats is not necessarily a city of social liberals. And,…
Read More…r a floor vote, and despite the likelihood that Governor Mary Fallin would sign it into law, I think SB-1433 is in danger of becoming a political hot potato. The die-hard “personhood” position—which holds that not just life, but legal rights, begin at some poorly-understood “moment of fertilization”—is not a position all pro-life people are comfortable with. And it’s not hard to understand why: What of women with life-threatening pregnancies? Does…
Read More…act that scientists themselves are using this vocabulary, he argues, “is a sign of the utility that these supernatural concepts still maintain” for describing our universe. The use of supernatural concepts to describe the Higgs boson has been hotly debated ever since CERN’s announcement. Over at io9, Dave Goldberg makes all the best arguments against it. The “God Particle” was coined by Leon Lederman in a book detailing how essential the Higgs is…
Read More…which receives millions in federal funds, and requires all US employees to sign its Christian Statement of Faith and/or The Apostles Creed. World Vision’s president, Richard Stearns, has been an outspoken critic of ending what is euphemistically known as “co-religionist hiring,” and has a coalition of conservative faith-based advocates backing him. After Obama pledged on the campaign trail in 2008 to reverse the Bush policy, evangelicals were up i…
Read More…o expected to pass the Senate easily; President Jose Mujica has pledged to sign it into law. Uruguay will soon join Argentina, which legalized marriage between same-sex couples in 2010. As in Argentina, marriage equality advanced in Uruguay over the objections of the Catholic hierarchy. Bishop Jaime Fuentes said last month, in language that will be familiar to marriage equality advocates in the U.S., that “children have a right to be raised by a f…
Read More
…d spiritual work at such a deep level that it was in his bones. A telltale sign: when Howard began his Judson work, 99% of working clergy had no real feeling for artists, and most were even slightly afraid of them as some kind of alien species. Howard not only loved all artists but he gravitated toward the edgiest and most experimental among them: the outlaws. I think he reveled in the avant garde because he himself was actually part of it: comple…
Read More
…their responsibility and allegiance to Israel as Americans and as Jews. As significant as the criticisms are, each reiterates the love of, and commitment to, Israel as an essential part of American Jewish identity. A number of factors contribute to this commitment, and they’ve shifted over the past few decades. Among the most tangled and oft-cited, however, is the claim, made by both Jews (inside and outside Israel) and Palestinians, that their pe…
Read More
…st redux of the strategy for 2008, but it was obvious neither the president’s nor the campaign’s hearts were in it. And maybe that’s a sign that they, too, are ready for a change….
Read More…nd to hold our history of persecution as a kind of personal treasure, as a sign of our own distinction, and to summon the residual edge of our defensiveness whenever we believe our lifeways are under threat. And we tend to use our twentieth-century history of successful assimilation as a reason to celebrate what we believe is our superior industry and morality, but what may in fact be our paycheck for willingly plugging ourselves into what the wor…
Read More
…lyptic preacher John Hagee. I would very much like to know whether they co-sign Hagee’s apocalyptic visions. I want to know the same answers about Romney, but not because he’s Mormon. Equally as pertinent to what Romney himself believes is what he thinks his base believes, and to what extent, as president, he’d be worrying about placating them. Remember, he was trying to show Mickelson he believes the same things evangelicals do. He’s running for…
Read More