Religion Dispatches
…te-sponsored wickedness and the canons of true politeness do not ban their use. When you use policy (rather than a gun) to kill innocent people, it’s called murder. When you ruin people by stripping them and their children of basic health care, that constitutes morally criminal assault. And make no mistake, when you boycott the inauguration (and promise resistance to) a presidency pre-announced as a compound of bigotry, misogyny, and the shredding…
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…ota spiritual leaders are careful regarding the details of their continued use of the Black Hills for religious purposes, there is no doubt they visit and still use their sacred sites on lands stolen over 135 years ago; lands they’re now forced to try to buy back. The brochure for the sale of the lands by Brock’s Auction House of South Dakota obliquely mentions the moment: “For 136 years, brave, strong, pioneering families… have forged the prairie…
Read More…g as they don’t then take that belief and beat me over the head with it or use that belief to write laws that enshrine my place as a second-class citizen in a country where I work and pay taxes and should be entitled to the same rights as everyone else. There can be no true tolerance until the guy with the club can be convinced to drop his weapon; to realize that no matter how scared he is of the snake, it is the snake that is the victim, and not…
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…e Care Act, to pay for the abortion coverage. Experts believe this could cause insurance companies, for economic reasons, to drop abortion coverage altogether, leaving women without a way for paying for an abortion, even in situations in which a continued pregnancy poses severe health risk. In addition, the Smith bill would prohibit women from using flexible savings or medical savings accounts — which are funded by their own money, not taxpayer mo…
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…e term “terrorism,” which is used in so many competing ways, might be most usefully defined as the use of violence in which an individual or group, motivated by an in-group/out-group ideology, indiscriminately targets members of the ideologically defined “out-group” in pursuit of the “in-group’s” sacred mission or purpose. If this is what we mean by the term “terrorism,” there are numerous ways in which the conventional strategy of force is, well,…
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…and more directly aligned with the ways Paul Johnson and Justin Dyer made use of the term. To flesh out this meaning, let’s consider Dignity Health, a Catholic hospital system which in 2019 merged with Catholic Health Initiatives to become CommonSpirit Health, the 5th-largest (and the 2nd-largest non-profit) hospital system in the United States. Here’s how Dignity Health explains its adoption of the term “dignity” to represent its identity to the…
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…blast me across the face of the earth. I use strange abstract symbols and codes to communicate both useless and necessary threads of conversation to my species. Sometimes it just makes me want to sit back, put my feet up, and marvel. I’m a good old-fashioned humanist—or, at least, about two-thirds of me is. I’m an academic in that great behemoth we call “the humanities”; a humanist by training. I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time reflecting on…
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…, to tell patients where they might find services the Catholic hospital refuses to provide (an ethical obligation many of us believe should be required of all recipients of public funding)? What, exactly, prevents a Catholic hospital from saying, kindly and calmly, “I’m sorry, we don’t provide contraception here as it is against the moral teachings of our church. However, I respect that you may have a different position or religious belief. If you…
Read More…Others worry that the outcome is far from clear, and that the problematic use of water-boarding and other interrogation techniques to which these men were subjected will put the Guantanamo Bay facility on trial every bit as much as the alleged 9/11 organizers will be. I myself worry that the decision to seek the death penalty in these cases will only ensure that the proceedings and the cycle of appeals drag on for years longer than they would oth…
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…ople have it. You have to have it for your heart, for your soul.” Why? Because “Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country and I truly believe that we have to bring them back and bring them back fast. . . that’s why our country is going haywire, because we have lost religion in our country.” The “Christians are under siege” language is old hat, but embedded within this rhetoric is a newer development. Trump never re…
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