Religion Dispatches
…gh public-private partnership, but the East India Company did it that much better. The East India Company’s flags, in turn, seem a likely influence on Old Glory. 23. History Itself The founding father of modern sociology, and arguably of modern history, was Tunisian Renaissance man Ibn Khaldun. In addition to analyzing the rise and fall of civilizations, Ibn Khaldun was a scholar of religion and mysticism. 24. Religion A Persian polymath attached…
Read More…lls reporting ‘atheist’ and LGBT girls and women to authorities The Daily Beast’s Ben Collins reports, “A band of Twitter trolls alleging to be from the Middle East spent Sunday and Monday repeatedly reporting ‘atheist’ and pro-LGBT girls and women to the local authorities in places where blasphemy laws allow for punishments as severe as death.” One of the trolls reporting LGBTQ and former Muslims defended his efforts, saying “They live in our saf…
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…eas. You could say the Democratic Party under Biden is a bunch of “liberal east coast elites.” But you must also say that those “liberal east coast elites” are popular with a majority of voters around the country. That’s silly, of course, because the myth is silly. American politics is complex. 4. The white working class All the talk about Trump’s appeal among white working class voters was based on an error. That error was defining white working…
Read More…quality countries Pink News reports that the Ugandan Minister of State for East African Affairs, Shem Bageine, wants to ban people from countries with marriage equality from adopting children from Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda, the members of the East African Community. Mexico: LGBT activists stage kiss-ins as response to anti-equality demonstrations LGBT activists organized a kiss-in (besotón, literally big kiss) in front of church…
Read More…motivator for violence. For the last few weeks, there have been clashes in East Jerusalem between Israeli police and Palestinian youth not because the Israeli police officers are Jewish, but because there has been a massive “crackdown” — in the words of one Jerusalem Post opinion writer, “collective punishment”. This includes closures of main roads, arbitrary and excessive use of crowd dispersal methods (tear gas, rubber bullets), and the random s…
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…ous teachers as well as scientists understand that there is a powerful “in-between state” between rationality and the transcendent. This leads you to hope for something like a new apophatic theology which may in fact embrace unknowing in a new way, without necessarily becoming simply another postmodern suspicion of the master narrative. Can you develop this idea a little more, and tell me how, in your boldest moments, you dream that it might come…
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…about. If American Jews who want to end one-sided diplomacy in the Middle East still censor what they say even among themselves, how can they expect America’s political elite to push for a different American approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict? How can they expect anyone in the executive branch to avoid anticipatory vetoes and start showing more courage? And how can they expect to make common cause with non-Jewish Americans who share their goal…
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…inline counterparts. So in 1954, Congress enacted the provision of the tax code at stake in Gaylor v. Mnuchin. A House committee said that the aim of the new subsection was to treat equally those ministers for whom churches provided housing and those who were paid housing allowances instead. The sponsor of the legislation, Illinois Democratic Rep. Peter Mack, justified the law in terms resonant of the fight against communism: Certainly, in these t…
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…al” amid the government’s recent crackdown on LGBT people: A 1945 criminal code passed by Britain when Tanzania was under its administration prescribes between 30 years to life in jail for gay male sex. Lesbian sex isn’t against the law. Activists say that, despite the law, former president Jakaya Kikwete, who was in office from 2005 to 2015, mainly left LGBT people alone. But since his successor John Magufuli was elected, that tolerance has evapo…
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…uples. The third criterion Dr. King identifies is that “an unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.” For same sex couples to have legal access just like heterosexual couples…
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