Religion Dispatches
…o do anything about it. The agency has several statutes that it could have used to regulate the ritual use of mercury inside homes, most importantly the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, which allows the agency to take a wide variety of regulatory actions against substances that pose an unreasonable risk to the environment or public health. To look into the issue, the EPA established a task force that conducted research and interviewed intere…
Read More…oms, with several parents challenging schools who let transgender children use the restroom of their choice, because they don’t want to have to explain to their kids why Brenda is now Johnnie. This upsets the whole applecart about fixed gender identities as well as traditional male and female sexual and culture roles. It’s not hard to understand how the more public emergence of transgender people is upsetting to more traditionally minded people, e…
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…rchasing power and capital goods orders. While conservatives frequently accused these programs of being useless “make-work,” a waste of taxpayers’ money, the reality is just the opposite. Useful work which would not otherwise have been done literally changed the face of the country and provided a lasting legacy. Workers built and repaired 1 million miles of roads and 200,000 public facilities—including schools, playgrounds, courthouses, parks and…
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…put it, strong. I was surprised to learn that, during the first Gulf War, Betty Aberlin and Fred Rogers had a fairly serious dispute over how to make best use of the platform they had to address the peace they both longed for—with Aberlin wanting to take a much more radical stand. Aberlin appealed to her Christian convictions, as Rogers elsewhere did to his. Was that a big surprise to you as well? The dispute between Aberlin and Rogers did not su…
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…dy else. And when it concerns science and technology, the more you do, the better. Morphological freedom is an attractive concept, and I agree that we should be open to thinking about new relationships between technology and humanity. Personally I don’t believe that there’s any one morally correct way to be human, or that technology is essentially good or evil, but many critics of transhumanism, I think, fear that technology will alter some vision…
Read More…your mortgage does NOT have to be paid off in order to go. People get confused by this, because one of the pre-conditions is that one must be debt-free. That doesn’t mean I don’t have an amount due against my credit card (or my mortgage, if I still had one), but it means I have keep my payments up in accordance to my agreements. No overdue amounts. I’ve done my mock packing. What is mock packing, you ask? Well, for this trip I have almost all new…
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…s of abortion rights and LGBTQ inclusion, can obtain “get out of criticism free” cards simply because they are outspoken opponents of Christian nationalism. Clearly we need better language to address anti-democratic Christian beliefs. So how does one responsibly cover Christian nationalists these days? To begin with, we must find language that doesn’t allow for the easy whitewashing of “respectable” Christians who hold authoritarian theological be…
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…Six—”The Brand”—but there’s no discussion of the work done to prop up and promote this charisma by the throngs of volunteers who provided free labor by serving the church as team members in worship; technology; media production; marketing and publicity; community groups; children’s ministry; women’s ministry; men’s ministry; security; building maintenance; facility multiplication; and hours spent outside of formal church service in a variety of w…
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…participants are encouraged to give their resources, time, and creativity freely to one another. Event organizers also consistently refuse all offers of corporate sponsorship, believing that it would be antithetical to their vision for the event to do so. On the flipside, this means that participants and others sometimes misconstrue the “gift economy” ethos as requiring Burning Man organizers to refrain entirely from engaging in the real-world m…
Read More…nsubstantiated claims such as “when you give money to groups that not only promote contraception but also promote abortion in an integrated way, you actually drive abortion rates up, not down.” Since 2000, Alvaré has taught law and brought her own brand of cherry-picked data tendentiously linked to the supposed dangers of abortion and contraception wrapped up as concern for women’s health and well-being to the Robert George/Witherspoon Institute/N…
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