Religion Dispatches
…reporters don’t really care about religious liberty like they care about a free press and free speech. In fact, she writes, “we have a press that loathes and works actively to suppress this religious liberty.”* She claims that reporters “are ignorant of natural rights, history, religion and basic civility.”* That, she maintains, is why they cavalierly dispensed with journalistic integrity as they reported on SB 1062. Hemingway insists that SB 10…
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…sidents? Where was mindfulness when the company decided to consolidate its user privacy policies against the better judgment of consumer groups and over thirty U.S. Attorneys General? Tellingly, none of these issues appear in Search Inside Yourself. They are blind spots within a corporate-friendly version of Buddhist philosophy. Meng’s version of mindfulness ignores institutional dukkha in favor of a myopic focus on personal stress reduction and i…
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…e federal RFRA, SB 101, and other states’ RFRAs are not identical just because they all use the moniker “Religious Freedom Restoration Act.” In fact, “not all RFRAs are created equal,” as Aaron Weaver wrote recently for a Religion News Service blog: “If [SB 101’s] conservative champions were truth tellers and not trading in deception trying to pretend the Indiana RFRA is the same as the federal RFRA, they’d acknowledge that the goal is not to rest…
Read More…d: Separate prison planned for LGBT inmates Officials announced plans to house LGBT prison inmates in their own facility to protect them from sexual and physical abuse from non-LGBT prisoners. Bermuda: Gay couple pushes for marriage despite recent referendum In a June referendum, a large majority of votes were cast in opposition to civil unions and marriage equality, but because turnout fell below 50 percent, the questions are officially considere…
Read More…of the National Shrine in Washington DC. Her gentle and generous welcome caused a stir because she dared to mention, albeit with deep respect, that the other half of the church (read: women) wants to be involved in all of its ministries. Her implicit reference to the ban on the ordination of women and women’s second-class citizenship in Catholicism was publicized around the world. The Pope did not comment directly at the time, but the fallout from…
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…s. 3. The right to a clean life Means the right of Mother Earth to a life free from pollution, because not only we humans have the right to live well, but also rivers, fish, animals, trees, and the Earth itself have the right to live in a healthy environment, free from poison and pollution. 4. The right to harmony and balance with everyone and among everyone Mother Earth has a right to be recognized as a part of a system in which all living crea…
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…s unable to bring to justice whoever ordered the killing. … In an open and free society, this chain of events would be cause for alarm: secret torture chambers, runaway authority, intimidation of the press. But Russia is not free, and Mr. Putin hardly seems perturbed. He tolerates brutality and coercion as instruments of state power, deaf to the cries of anguish from its victims. In a commentary for the European Council on Foreign Relations, Anna…
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…
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…Stace’s “Man Against Darkness” confrontation of a meaningless universe—are better than agnosticism. They are truer, because they involve being what we truly are: subjects who are related to the universe in a passionate way. Or as Yann Martel puts it in his novel Life of Pi: I can well imagine an atheist’s last words: “White, white! L-L-Love! My God!”—and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if…
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…
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