Religion Dispatches
…only the latest wave of an Islamic ‘tsunami’ sweeping the globe.” Oh, and look! The Brotherhood has learned its tactics from Bill Ayers and Code Pink. Don’t you love living in a fact-free world?…
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…d, 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 hoping to find something in a church that will reconnect me to my Judaism,” he writes, a sentiment that elsewhere he codifies into the more marketable slogan “I want Jesus to make me a better Jew.” But what does th…
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…illed when she created RBG needlepoint kits for each woman to make. “They felt she was a role model, such a strong woman.” They expressed that admiration in thread. Matter matters in Justice Ginsburg’s memorialization and emerging hagiography. When you see a white lace collar over a black robe, she is the first person who comes to mind. As Americans mourned her death, memorials popped up all over the country. Of all the votives offered in her memo…
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…rency from all the nation’s churches and no viable claim that it violates religious freedom. Tax exemption is a privilege, not a right. Congress can attach strings to that privilege, including financial transparency. Nothing in the Constitution requires that we even exempt churches from taxes, let alone exempt them from basic transparency requirements. Even the most extreme understanding of religious freedom could not stop Congress from legislatin…
Read More…oment. I first want to highlight a couple of points in Vargas’ story that relate to religious activism around immigration reform. In his piece, Vargas discusses how his mother and grandparents, knowing that they got him into the United States without proper documentation, believed his undocumented status could eventually be rectified if he married an American citizen. But what they didn’t know was that Vargas is gay. He therefore falls into a cate…
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…ll and voting for the abortion provisions in the health care law that the religious right falsely claims includes federal funding for abortions. This is the terrain of the religious right-tea party alliance: government is the enemy, they agree. Any further alliance will be forged not on whether tea partiers start to talk about abortion and gay marriage at rallies, but whether they can agree on a second point, after government is the enemy: that th…
Read More…y a man who has sacrificed and suffered for his country, gets by with scarcely a religious word in utterance. As many times as we have heard the harrowing tales of his captivity in North Vietnam, the way he turned to the thought of his fellow captives, the code of honor of the US military, to the Constitution itself, one never hears that he turned to his God, or to prayer. I do not suggest that he ought to have done, of course. I simply note that…
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…F. Robinson does in his extraordinary new book, The Lost White Tribe, can help unravel that claim. For a book that focuses on long-dead explorers and old scientific texts, The Lost White Tribe feels startlingly relevant to the present political moment. Robinson’s excavation begins from a bizarre and little-known strand of history: long before Europeans began exploring far-flung lands, they dreamed of finding white people there. And once they start…
Read More…nto intelligent design.” “PROHIBITION OF DISCRIMINATION BASED ON RESEARCH RELATED TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN. An institution of higher education may not discriminate against or penalize in any manner, especially with regard to employment or academic support, a faculty member or student based on the faculty member’s or student’s conduct of research relating to the theory of intelligent design or other alternate theories of the origination and developmen…
Read More…around them. Often, it’s better to part than to remain in a soul-killing relationship. I do believe, however, that conservative religious people who preach against the evils of same-sex marriage have long needed to clean their own doorsteps before going off on gays and lesbians who want to marry. Jesus, who said nothing about homosexuality, had plenty to say about heterosexual couples who divorced. Throughout the Bible, divorce has been strongly…
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