Religion Dispatches
…rades to the site—an enhanced reading experience, better integration with social media, peace on earth. (We’ll be updating via our newsletter, here.) It’s our birthday, but it’s you who deserve the party (and the gluten-free, kosher, vegan, cruelty-free cake). Thank you for reading, for writing, and for your thoughtful and dynamic engagement with the ever-evolving question of religion in public life and culture. Yours, The Eds. …
Read More…et Journal exposed FreedomWorks for building “amateur-looking” websites to promote far right interests of Armey. FreedomWorks represents a top-down, corporate-friendly approach that’s been the norm for conservative organizations for years. How do I know this is the norm? Because I used to have strategy meetings with the late Jack Kemp and Dick Army and the rest of the Republican gang about using their business ties to help finance the pro-life mov…
Read More…Islam, that are enslaved by Islam and I want them to know that they can be free,” he said. Which begs the question about how Christians treat women. While it’s true Christian women are not expected to wear burkhas they still are treated horribly by many Christians. Many Christian denominations continue to ban women from ordination or to any leadership position where they may be in a position to “teach a man.” Conservative Christians still expect w…
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…tle to do with the worship of a marginalized Jew, named Jesus, who came to free the poor and oppressed. This counterfeit Christian community worships power, desires control, and imagines the world revolving around self-sufficient men (and a few women). I call it “Mad Man Religion.” Mad Man Religion looks just like Christianity. It connects religious practices to free market practices like you would connect pieces from a Lego set. And it offers to…
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…le was emphatic that Christianity was the one thing standing in the way of free market capitalism taking over the United States and ruining the morals of the citizens. He saw Christianity as providing a check on market logics. There have been times when certain forms of Christianity—that of the Transcendentalists in the 1830s and 40s, for instance—exhibited the potential for a gospel of debt forgiveness to stand in opposition to the free market. B…
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…d were saddened and disturbed by Mister Rogers’s apparent unwillingness to free Shamu from the confines of the Sea World tank. The letters are very touching in the care they express for a killer whale in need of the freedom afforded by a vast ocean. They are also moving in the sense that they are the product of Rogers’s own creation—his handwork in encouraging children to express their feelings, including those of anger and disappointment. The let…
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…ple. It’s what you can do for yourself and others. As it is, White evangelical Protestants have it both ways. A vote for apartheid free of consequence, free of guilt….
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…amilton, “is about the agenda that started with Rosenberger of re-crafting Free Exercise claims that have no chance of winning into free speech claims.” In Rosenberger v. University of Virginia, decided in 1995, the Court ruled that a public university engaged in “viewpoint discrimination” when it refused to fund religious clubs on the grounds that such funding might appear to be an endorsement of a particular religious group, in violation of the…
Read More…“Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.” I am with Milton here: The freer the press, the less the innocent have to fear and the more the guilty need to be worried. We’d like to think so. But the rub, as Miller argues, is that all too often the light merely shines on crafty rhetoric. Read Miller’s piece here. *Ingrid Schlueter resigned, sh…
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…a long time. Indeed, what comes up first in a Google search for Religious Freedom Day is ReligiousFreedomDay.com, the work of a California-based Christian right agency called Gateways to Better Education. This group is part of a wider movement that seeks to evangelize children in public schools—as detailed in Katherine Stewart’s book, The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children. Gateways states that they work w…
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