Religion Dispatches
…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…
Read More…it’s unclear how the case would proceed. According to the Brazilian penal code, criminal charges for genocide can be brought against nationals but foreigners cannot be prosecuted under national law. One possible explanation for FUNAI’s approach is to generate awareness of the detrimental outlook for the agency and the indigenous communities they protect. The incident comes on the heels of growing threats to indigenous sovereignty by a new right-w…
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…
Read More…tark misogyny of the antiabortion movement with the tagline “Women Deserve Better” (than abortion). Feminists for Life has been an early promoter of the increasingly popular prolife emphasis on the harm abortion does to women, and a champion of “father’s rights” with the help of the disgraced ex-Bush appointee Wade Horn (the former pro-abstinence Assistant Secretary of Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services who r…
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…Christian society and a form of religious politics that will make biblical code the law of the United States. These activists are quite serious about bringing Christian politics into power. Bray said that it is possible, under the right conditions, for a Christian revolution to sweep across the United States and bring in its wake Constitutional changes that would allow for biblical law to be the basis of social legislation. Failing that, Bray envi…
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…ybe society is to blame, but it’s hard to pin down any concrete connection between social conditions and a given act of terror; while social science identifies patterns, it can rarely tell us where the blame lies in any specific instance. In a recent essay for The Atlantic, criminologist Simon Cottee challenges the idea that we can ever fully understand why someone becomes a terrorist. “Everyone from clerics to caustic cab drivers seems to have a…
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…, the repetition is easy to explain. They are locked up, they have nothing better to do, and they share only that one joke-book. But what explains the constant number-calling around homosexuality in so many American churches? Why do we rehearse arguments most anyone active in church has already heard dozens of time? Why do we behave like prisoners? I don’t think that long-term veterans of church debates have much hope that undecided people will be…
Read More…ated into criminalizing such styles, coming uncomfortably close to a dress code. Many of those against the bill are worried that it threatens national unity; though Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim country, it has significant minorities from other religions who feel that this bill is pushing a definition of pornography under the guise of “Islamicizing” the entire nation or riding roughshod over Indonesia’s secular pluralism. There are…
Read More…cannot do within the guidelines of the IRS rules. He cited the part of the code that prohibits influencing legislation and labeled it “legalese,” before a lengthy parsing of what counts as legislation and then what counts as influencing— none of which substantially departed from everyday understanding of those terms. The talk sounded much like the “word study” sermon style found in many fundamentalist churches. He was careful to clarify that wheth…
Read More…, New Hampshire, and Iowa) promoting a creationist film called The Genesis Code, and holding fundraising receptions. The moralistic film follows an unbelieving hockey player and a Christian journalism student who struggle with “reconciling their scientific studies and what’s taught in the Bible” as he falls for her and she uses their relationship to “guide” him “toward God.” You can read a “pro-family” review here that warns of sex (kissing) and n…
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