Religion Dispatches
…vernment, perhaps a unity coalition guaranteed by the military, leading to free and fair elections after the shortest time possible within which campaigning can be organized. This requires all the stakeholders on the ground, who are not representatives of the dictatorship, to come to the table, and to receive guarantees both from one another but also from regional powers who can help nudge the process forward. The military has won itself a seat at…
Read More…lled the rally, being organised by activist group Roopbaan — which says it promotes freedom of love and gender equality — at the last minute, after Islamists threatened to beat up participants… Gays and lesbians suffer discrimination and worse in Bangladesh where homosexuality is a crime punishable by a maximum life term, although prosecutions are rare. However, the Roopbaan rally, which was denied permission late on Wednesday, had been allowed to…
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…nd their well-being at heart. With thousands of children going without the free or reduced lunches they depended on for a midday meal, it was a handful of churches and members of the community that would feed them breakfast and lunch. Meanwhile, national chain luxe-grocer Whole Foods would instead provide food for the National Guardsmen deployed by Republican Gov. Larry Hogan to “maintain order.” People of color in cities such as Baltimore or Flin…
Read More…similar but far more significant quandary. The nightmare scenario involves free and fair elections in Egypt that put a “radical” Islamist government into power. This government then enacts foreign policy decisions hostile to US (and Israeli) interests and hence serves to “destabilize the region.” The US and Israel lose a key ally in the region, ushering in a new period of unrest. Forestalling this scenario, commentators are arguing that this is n…
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…ple. It’s what you can do for yourself and others. As it is, White evangelical Protestants have it both ways. A vote for apartheid free of consequence, free of guilt….
Read More…mmensely polite attitude of people searching those coming into Tahrir. The free teas that were spreading all around Tahrir, no doubt paid for through the charitable support of someone in the crowd, or donated by the tea-shop owner – its just another part of the Egypt I have always known. But the Egypt I have known would never have seen people feeling free to voice their criticisms of the president so strongly or openly – that type of attitude cert…
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…orgiven, confiscated properties are returned, and slaves and prisoners are freed. Osteen’s interpretation turns Jesus’s vision of legal, structural relief for the marginalized into a call for human self-improvement. Laurie and White-Cain present two prevalent views of free will that are often used to support Republican opposition to what they call “Big Government.” Whether believers are supposed to rely more on God or themselves as a hurricane des…
Read More…es. Lebanese Muslims work predominately as businesspeople in the lucrative Free Trade Zone, one of the largest free trade ports in the world. In the city center, many residents are descendants of West Indian laborers on the Panama Canal throughout the twentieth century. The city has one of the highest rates of poverty in the country. Every year, a group of black Muslims in Colón hosts an event to celebrate Eid-ul-Udha, a holiday that marks the end…
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…vating the most refined bourgeois values. Yet as an advocate of individual freedom and as a Jew with relatively newly-minted political rights, he also had to promote the democracy of the Third Republic against its ultra-nationalist conservative critics. Of course democracy could so easily lead to laws and values dictated by the masses—the same rude mobs calling for Dreyfus’ blood in the streets of Paris. How, then, to harmonize free thought with…
Read More…Smith jurisprudence,” she wrote. RFRA didn’t expand the scope of religious freedom rights, and in the case law there is “no support for the notion that free exercise rights pertain to for-profit corporations.” There’s a reason for that, Ginsburg maintained. While the Constitution and the courts have long recognized a “special solicitude” for religious organizations, there is no such solicitude for commercial entities. The reason for that is “hardl…
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