Religion Dispatches
…r worldly peers while simultaneously beholden to an arcane and restrictive code of behavior—is actually rather compelling. “Being tugged in one direction by the secular world and in another by the religious world, they have styled their own compromise,” he says, “[and yet] they also feel an unbearable sense of loneliness and despair.” But the extent to which Cohen understands his own motivations for journeying into Christendom is unclear. “I’m hop…
Read More…affney reiterated his shari’ah claims: As the Center for Security Policy’s new, best-selling Team B II report entitled, Shariah: The Threat to America, found, It is now public knowledge that nearly every major Muslim organization in the United States is actually controlled by the MB or a derivative organization. Consequently, most of the Muslim-American groups of any prominence in America are now known to be, as a matter of fact, hostile to the Un…
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…dren is worth getting riled up about. Nor do I mean “Let’s be cautious” as code for “Maybe this isn’t an important question.” To the contrary, it’s a vital question. Yet it’s also an easy question to approach in an unhelpful way. Precisely because sexual abuse is appallingly common, compassionate people look for patterns to explain why it happened in this instance and not that one. And that’s a good thing: abuse prevention means recognizing common…
Read More…asking women campaigners to make in accepting this legislation based on a code of practice and please do be prepared to meet us half way as this draft legislation suggests.” On the other side of the aisle, traditionalists in the Church of England are less than pleased with the legislation. Rod Thomas, Bishop of Plymouth and leading traditionalist stated: “This leaves us very clearly with a feeling that our ministry in the church is simply being t…
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…ere a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? The DaVinci Code. Now, that’s a profitable reworking of Christian history. I wouldn’t have to worry about paying for my daughter’s college education. Seriously, I wish I could have written Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. It is one of those magisterial books about history that has become part of history. Books like that happen once in a generation. Sigh. What’s your next book? It is on…
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…ry becomes even murkier. Take Trijicon, for example, chosen from a Deseret News listicle, “20 companies with religious roots.” Deseret News included Trijicon in the list because the company “inscribed coded biblical references on high-powered rifle sights used by the U.S. military.” That’s it. Other than the founder’s purported religious beliefs, its inclusion is arbitrary. Why not include Ebay, whose founder Pierre Omidyar is a Buddhist, or any o…
Read More…uld be outlawed A parliamentary commission on religion is advocating that “promotion of atheism” be criminalized; according to Pink News, the commission “ruled that atheism can cause ‘mental imbalances’ which in turn leads to homosexuality.’” It is believed that the commission hopes that by pushing through the law it will support the bid of another law which has been deemed the most homophobic law in the world. The second law which is currently be…
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…eated last week in the Senate. But there are reasons why it should be. The new Secretary of the Army, John McHugh, came to the Pentagon after serving as the representative of New York’s 23rd District, where last month conservative activists forced the Republican running for McHugh’s old seat, Dede Scozzafava, out of the race for being insufficiently conservative. McHugh’s own culture war credentials are solid, earning him kudos from religious righ…
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…families in concrete ways. He’s talking about a “more family-friendly tax code.” He wants the government to pay people to procreate. It’s a “big government” Republicans can get behind—a “baby government.” Though women of childbearing age are the people Douthat wants to get busy getting pregnant, he doesn’t talk about women very much—or the social, physical, and financial costs women still pay for having kids. Douthat blames women without talking…
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…ause they were subjugated. After colonialism in the mid-twentieth century, newly drawn, aggressively secular, Muslim-majority countries inherited the colonial state apparatus and adopted new legal systems, usually based on the French civil-law system. Because these repressive post-colonial Muslim governments were secular, opposition to them naturally formed under the banner of Islam. The post-colonial Muslim governments, seeking legitimacy and try…
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