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What the USCCB’s New “Religious Liberty” Initiative Took from Evangelicals

By Sarah Posner

…and even some Eastern Orthodox Christians joined hands in protecting their freedom from the scourges of LGBT rights, reproductive freedom, feminism, and secularism. At the time, a handful of Catholic bishops signed the document. Now the USCCB seems to have been motivated by its success: it is, after all, touted widely at conservative and religious right gatherings and now claims nearly half a million signers. Religious liberty, the document procla…

After Westboro: The Trouble With “Tolerance”

By Cody J. Sanders

…the world by our vocal chords, speech produces real consequences. That is, free speech is not free from consequences that affect our bodily, material reality. Our speech, our words, our language constructs our world, defines reality and gives meaning to our sense of self. Michel Foucault called this type of power “discourse.” The term “discourse” describes the stories we as a society tell about ourselves and the world, from what perspective we tel…

Q Shaman’s New Age-Radical Right Blend Hints at the Blurring of Seemingly Disparate Categories

By Susannah Crockford

…onal ascension leading to galactic ascension; chakras; the universe; light codes; overcoming negative emotion; 100th monkey collective; the flower of life and sacred geometry; the divine is within; be your own guru; astrology; and so on. He advertises his now-defunct website starseedacademy.space, and promotes Life-Wave patches, a multi-level marketing scheme that he claims cured his father of cancer and liver disease. A starseed is a person who b…

Restoring Dignity: The Employee Free Choice Act

By Peter Laarman

…arely delivered) than to allow workers to unionize without interference in free and fair representation elections. By the Numbers The cold, hard facts are these: Polls consistently report that 60 million Americans would join a union tomorrow if they could, which clearly suggests that there’s something wrong with the current system for allowing workers to decide this question. Just going by official National Labor Relations Board numbers (which sur…

Supreme Court to Hear Hobby Lobby, Conestoga Cases

By Sarah Posner

…e free speech cases, the plaintiffs have argued that the separation of the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses by a semicolon requires that the two clauses be interpreted, for these purposes, identically. (Filmmaker Drew Emery calls the upcoming Supreme Court case “the world’s most closely watched semicolonoscopy.”) In Conestoga, though, the Third Circuit rejected those arguments. “We are not persuaded that the use of a semi-colon means that eac…

The Forgotten Struggle Over Gender and Bigotry in Christianity

By Stephen J. Patterson

…ral obliteration. “There is no Jew or Greek” stands alongside “no slave or free” and “no male and female.” These are not distinctions of religion and culture, but of power and privilege. In the world of Greek and Roman antiquity, free men had power and agency, slaves and women did not. The creed was originally built on an ancient cliché that went something like this: I thank God every day that I was born a native, not a foreigner; free and not a s…

Rent-Free Religion in New York’s Public Schools

By Katherine Stewart

…granted permits for worship services. The new churches valued not just the free real estate, but also the proximity to children and families, and the credibility provided by their new physical setting. Owing to the fact that schools are generally available to the community only on Sundays, not Fridays or Saturdays, the opportunity was not open in any significant way to Muslim or Jewish congregations. “We have been enjoying meeting in the school th…

SCOTUS Seems to Think You Should Be Forced to Pay For Religious Education

By John Stoehr

…majority will continue to ignore the establishment clause and blow up the free exercise clause into a broadly applicable special rights provision. A free ticket for the religious to exempt themselves from federal and state laws—most importantly, public health and anti-discrimination laws. JS: Do these special rights provisions apply equally? The court is on a mission to remake free-exercise law. Not too long ago, it held that religious people and…

Original Spin: Progressives Dismiss Conservative Theology at Their Peril

By Ira Chernus

…w it, of the truly great evil: the subordination of every kind of personal freedom to the arbitrary will of the government. “Freedom has been defined as the opportunity for self-discipline,” he said in his 1957 State of the Union address. “Should we persistently fail to discipline ourselves, eventually there will be increasing pressure on government to redress the failure. By that process freedom will step by step disappear.” Since, in this view,…

Why it (Still) Makes Little Sense to Call ISIS Islamic

By Haroon Moghul

…oorly reconstructed Ba’athists on the Muslim margins.) Suleiman stressed: “Freeing slaves” is so frequently mentioned as a meritorious act in the Muslim tradition that, in the 8th and 9th centuries, biographies of Prophetic companions cited, as virtues, manumission; Muhammad’s wife, Aisha, was lauded for “freeing six hundred slaves.” All well and good: Muhammad changed what slavery meant, or at least sought to, and the tradition developed in respo…