Religion Dispatches
…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…
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…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…
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…ument made by conservatives in the U.S. who dislike the current GOP but refuse to support Democrats: Presented with a choice between “the Left” and even the far-right, they see “the Left” as the bigger existential threat—and will stick with the Right despite expressions of bigotry, violations of the law, anti-democratic behavior, and more. Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews, was not convinced, though his predecessor and presi…
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…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…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…
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…else begins to define and delineate for them what it means to be human and free. Only then do people get up in arms. If we are going to conserve our humanities, we must be actively involved in our politics and education. Only through the reflection on what it means to be human—a reflection that engages with those beyond our immediate community, state, and nation—can we teach and learn to become better humans for both ourselves and each other. As A…
Read More…United States Capitol with his band of fear-stoking propagandists. Gaffney is right. The Constitution is under attack. The panic that the Constitution is so weak that it would collapse under the weight of a few contracts providing for alternative dispute resolution, or wither from upholding the Free Exercise clause for Muslims or conducting criminal trials in accordance with it, has actually caused a mortal threat to the Constitution and the free…
Read More…ecision did not violate the group’s First Amendment rights of association, free speech, and free exercise. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority: In requiring CLS—in common with all other student organizations—to choose between welcoming all students and forgoing the benefits of official recognition, we hold, Hastings did not transgress constitutional limitations. CLS, it bears emphasis, seeks not parity with other organizations, but…
Read More…one agrees with him or not is beside the point. Anti-choice Catholics are free to argue goals and strategies, and a religion publication is free to host parts of that conversation. This is about context and consistency. It’s about the fact that Dolan’s piece is, in more than one way, suggestive of the very favoritism that Jones and Russell-Kraft document. First off, there’s history here between Rev. Reese and the Catholic hierarchy. Reese was onc…
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…ory of recognizing that the state can use its power to take away religious freedom.” The kind of religious freedom the panelists discussed, of course, isn’t the Orwellian distortion posed by the Christian Right in both its Catholic and evangelical wings, in which religious freedom is invoked in order to justify the oppression of others, but the liberatory idea of religious freedom for all, including the non-religious, that traditional Baptists hav…
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