Religion Dispatches
…and Donald Argue, members of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, said that the language was “a cleverly coded way of granting religious leaders the right to criminalize speech and activities that they deem to insult religion.” Moon’s UN project? Still in the hopper! To gain a better appreciation for Moon’s powerful political, religious, and economic empire, check out John Gorenfeld’s Bad Moon Rising: How Reverend Moon Created th…
Read More…ena. On Easter Sunday, an 11-year-old girl named Kara Neumann died from diabetic ketoacidosis. Treatments of insulin almost certainly would have controlled the ailment, but Kara’s parents (whose beliefs about physical healing were shaped in part by a Florida-based online ministry) chose to treat her with prayer in lieu of medical science. Dale and Leilani Neumann later told police that their daughter had not been examined by a physician in more th…
Read More…rty wishlist (a merger Robison endorsed last year while helping Ralph Reed promote the launch of his Faith and Freedom Coalition). In a nutshell: America should be ruled by God, not government, with no abortion, gay marriage, or jurisprudence Robison disagrees with; the market should be kept “free, healthy, and under the influence of people who understand that importance of personal responsibility,” as “out of control spending” and “intrusive regu…
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…ollowing the Dover decision, the Discovery Institute unveiled its academic freedom campaign, in 2008, complete with a web site providing sample legislation for interested state lawmakers. The institute’s John West made sure to stress that the bills never mentioned intelligent design. But as DI’s past actions clearly indicate, the goal was still to pry open the door for sympathetic teachers to teach intelligent design and creationism. Louisiana, Al…
Read More…e handed me a booklet called The Way to Happiness: A Common Sense Guide to Better Living. The rules in chapter one are indeed common sense: Get care when you are ill; Keep your body clean; Preserve your teeth; Eat properly; and Get Rest. Other rules caution against harmful drugs, excessive drinking, and sexual promiscuity. Two chapters are devoted to the Golden Rule, stated both positively and negatively (“Try not to do to things to others that yo…
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…won’t be up for selection until 2012. Dan Quinn, a spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network, “[a nonpartisan, grassroots] watchdog, monitoring far-right issues, organizations, money and leaders,” said it’s going to require a watchful eye to prevent board members from using the new provision to adopt creationist-friendly or intelligent design literature. Quinn said that board members could reject material for factual errors. “But then it becomes a b…
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…Nike’s unwillingness to permit long-term audits by the WRC will “set labor code reforms back 15 years,” according to Kline. He and students at Georgetown have called on the university to end its business relationship with Nike. Villanova students created a petition, underscoring the conflict between the university’s Catholic values and Nike’s complicity in worker exploitation. Administrators at universities including Cornell, Rutgers, Oberlin, Geo…
Read More…ffers high family entertainment value, therefore we will be continuing our promotion. “We regularly offer promotions to our IKEA FAMILY members across a variety of entertainment options, and in this case, our IKEA FAMILY members were being offered a discount on tickets to the show. “As a company, IKEA Singapore respects the diversity and equality of all people living in our community. We also respect that all individuals have a right to their opin…
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…key function of their official capacity, and legally recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex. While several county clerks offices have already implemented procedures to allow clerks to hand off marriage license duties to another clerk if they have a religious conviction, SB 522 goes much further, the Tribune notes. The bill goes into great detail about the chain of recusal, laying out the protocol if a county clerk, their deputy c…
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…s (e.g., Talal Asad, José Casanova, Charles Taylor, Saba Mahmood, and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd) have argued, the delimitation of the social spheres of religion and politics, and the boundary between them, is socially-constituted, variable, and constantly contested. This does not mean that “there is no such thing” as religion or politics, or that one term can simply be collapsed into the other; it means that what counts as religion and politics will…
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