Religion Dispatches
…ees us as a unique species—not like any other animal. He has, for example, reservations about animal rights. Too much empathy for other creatures, he alleges, can lead to “empathy inflation.” If we want to protect the rights of non-humans, we might as well torture ourselves over whether or not we have the right to kill the harmful bacteria that’s crawling around on (and in) us. The borders of the human might be “variegated and fuzzy,” Lanier says,…
Read More…of discussion, and to no one’s surprise, the group decided to shelve their reservations about John McCain and endorse him in the fall campaign. “The alternative is so bad,” Phyllis Schlafly declared, “we must support John McCain.” The meeting was called by Mathew Staver, dean of the law school at Liberty University. Those in attendance included Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values in Ohio, Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther Ki…
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…of discussion, and to no one’s surprise, the group decided to shelve their reservations about John McCain and endorse him in the fall campaign. “The alternative is so bad,” Phyllis Schlafly declared, “we must support John McCain.” The meeting was called by Mathew Staver, dean of the law school at Liberty University. Those in attendance included Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values in Ohio, Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther Ki…
Read More…als said they “strongly favored” Romney, and about 30% said they had “some reservations”—proportions just about equivalent to those reported for Romney voters overall. In the voting booth, partisanship trumped sectarianism. As we knew it would. But according to the Pew enthusiasm for Romney overall lagged behind the enthusiasm of Obama voters, seventy percent of whom said they “strongly favored” the president. Perhaps Romney’s team is to be credit…
Read More…ression, blood, and violence beneath the freedom it proclaims. Pawlenty gives us Martin Luther King Jr. but not the church bombings, police dogs, and fire hoses. He gives us a quaint picture of horses and wagons but no images of American Indian removal, Indian wars, and shrinking reservations. He gives us the fall of the Berlin Wall but not McCarthyism. It’s an ad for a book (a book that isn’t selling that well, apparently) and not a history less…
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…er about his project, he had in mind a number of parallels between the late 1800s and the early 2000s. Then as now, inequality was on the rise as the rich became richer and the poor struggled to improve their lives. Then also as now, church attendance rates began to decline as congregants grew disaffected with Church leadership. In both cases, progressive Christians have questioned the Church’s dedication to social justice over and against more po…
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…h potential juror how they felt about the death penalty; any who expressed reservations were excused, even though only five of them had said that they would under no circumstances consider the penalty. The majority of US Supreme Court justices concluded that “the State of Illinois has stacked the deck against the petitioner,” and that in so doing it had violated the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that US citizens cannot be deprived of life, liberty,…
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…pting of LGBT people, but still less than 24% of Koreans said they had “no reservations about homosexuality,” according to a 2014 survey conducted by the Asian Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank. Korea has a large Christian population, and vocal Protestant groups have for years blocked the inclusion of sexual minorities in a proposed anti-discrimination bill by pressuring politicians to vote against it. Jang, the army chief of staff who al…
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…the founders of the evangelical Right to neutralize previous, Bible-based reservations about Catholic pro-life activism. By 1980, Jerry Falwell was off to the races. “The Bible clearly states that life begins at conception,” he declared in his book Listen America! Abortion “is murder according to the Word of God.” Falwell’s major reference for this claim was Psalm 139:13, where the author writes that God “knit me together in my mother’s womb.” Mo…
Read More…belongs to a Church that strictly prohibits tobacco use, apparently had no reservations about promoting tobacco in countries which had no or few regulations on the promotion or use of tobacco products. In fact, the documents show that this was the clear objective of American tobacco companies who were facing declining sales at home due to increased government regulations and scrutiny. Romney has spoken of his personal disdain for tobacco, revealin…
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