Religion Dispatches
…d Snyder “an idiot governor.” He discussed campaigns that would invoke the free exercise clause to challenge Snyder’s legislation, including the assertions that gay marriage is a Satanic sacrament and that Satanic bodies are sacrosanct and cannot be subject to trans-vaginal probes. On June 30, The Supreme Court ruled that Hobby Lobby could invoke religious objections to avoid covering contraception in its employees’ health plans. This ruling encou…
Read More…their views by erecting monuments—and then vetoed an atheist monument because its use of “incomplete quotations” did not meet their guidelines. This strategy—in which atheists are legally allowed the same rights as Christians but are silenced on technicalities—is fairly common. Recent cases on both sides of the Atlantic bear an eerie similarity to the case in Bronson. Last August, Hermant Mehta wrote on a case in Georgia where atheists objected t…
Read More…r, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen that have very different notions of free speech and the separation between church and state. It was thoughtless for the library to check the box marked “occult” when planning their Internet filtering policy, but what’s even more disturbing here is that something as central to a democratic society as which sites can be accessed in a public library have been outsourced to a foreign corporation. How many America…
Read More
…own spiritual/cultural values. Liberals see porous borders as a symbol of freedom: free movement, free choice, and the free creativity generated by the intermingling of peoples. To conservatives, the very presence of so many Illegal “aliens” proves that the borders they once imagined as the key to a safe, orderly life have long been crumbling around them. To give undocumented people legal status would be further proof that the nation’s walls and…
Read More
…t that aims to “sabotage Christian supremacy.” “By framing their case as a betrayal of the Free Exercise Clause, [Trinity Lutheran] argues that not getting to put their hands in the money pot is a transgression against their absolute entitlement, and that limiting their access to all resources is an attack on their ability to freely exercise their religion,” Herrin continued. That tactic isn’t novel, of course, but a Supreme Court ruling that affi…
Read More
…in full swing, hard-right strategists William Lind and Paul Weyrich at the Free Congress Foundation had a vision for the future of the American right. They argued that American conservatives, having successfully mainstreamed a free-market consensus, should pivot to the terrain of social issues, and adopt a “cultural conservatism” centered on family, education, crime, and morality, in order to shape public discourse. Needing a new enemy to rally th…
Read More
…uggest. The Talmud doesn’t include those other voices, not necessarily because they thought they were heretics, but because they weren’t part of the club and thus their views had little if any authority. If all we had was the Babylonian Talmud we’d know very little about Babylonian Jewry in this period. All we’d have is the record of a thin slice of the society in a small number of academies. Today, Talmudic scholars are exploring the wider vistas…
Read More
…is latest wonderful aphorism. If Medvedev gave his presidency the slogan: “Freedom is better than non-freedom”, then, thanks to Medvedev’s felicitous saying, Putin’s third term has a good chance of being known by a new aphorism: “Prison is better than stoning.” I would like you to think carefully about the following reflection by Montaigne from his Essays written in the 16th century. He wrote: “You are holding your opinions in too high a regard if…
Read More…e explicit in their concern for structural justice and the failings of the free market system. Famously, Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium denounces those who “continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world” as expressing a “crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding eco…
Read More…ristian Groups’ Complaints Lead to Cancellation of Queer Art Exhibit Queermuseu, or Queer Museum, an exhibition at Santander Bank’s cultural center in Porto Alegre was closed a month early after protests by anti-gay Christian groups. From the Guardian: Supported by evangelical Christians, protestors from the Free Brazil Movement accused the exhibition – which included 263 works from Brazilian greats such as Candido Portinari and Lygia Clark – of p…
Read More