Religion Dispatches
…ually strong exercise of exclusion, than the Talmud. Shaul Magid is a Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, and Contributing Editor to Tablet magazine. His forthcoming book Meir Kahane: An American Jewish Radical will be published by Princeton University Press….
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…tion [to pursue changing from gay to straight].” True. That’s the point of free will. However, it wouldn’t be free will unless the partnered gay Christian has the ability to choose to live as a partnered gay Christian. Once these ideas were given voice the conversation quickly shifted, as each heard the other for the first time. When social policy, theology, and personally-tied emotions are parted for even the slightest moment, it becomes clear th…
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…rman-born journalist Francis J. Grund identified the essential differences between American and European Christianity. “The Americans,” he wrote, “enjoy a threefold advantage: they have more preachers; they have more active preachers, and they have cheaper preachers than can be found in any part of Europe.” What explained European Christianity’s weakness to compete? The answer, de Tocqueville reasoned, was that “the church cannot share the tempora…
Read More…for free. In exchange for all this unpaid content, columnists are largely free to write about whatever it is they like. Consequently, Huffington Post’s living pages have long been filled with various anti-science sentiments and new age woo, from vitamin cures to the “science of distant healing.” Most egregiously, it has provided a place for Jenny McCarthy and others to peddle ongoing claims about there being a link between autism and vaccine shot…
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…v. Barber noted that he’s White, Tuscarora (a Native American tribe) and African American, and has had to “recover from some deep hatred” from the time the Klan burned a cross in front of the home of his uncle—who provided him with a shotgun in case they came in through the back door. Nosie added that it’s vital to stay on “the spiritual path” to avoid becoming like what we oppose, but he warned that it won’t be easy. “By fighting these fights and…
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…a network of schools and interfaith centers, and has been known to provide free trips to American academics to show them the Hizmet activities in Turkey. In the spirit of full disclosure, I am one of those academics who have benefited from a casual association with members of the Hizmet movement in the United States. But I didn’t get a free trip to Turkey. In my case I had given talks in spring of 2015, that were jointly sponsored by a Hizmet inte…
Read More…a young woman she cajoled away from Planned Parenthood with a promise of a free pregnancy test. The buffer zone cases really aren’t about free speech, they are about the evolving nature of protest in the anti-choice movement. In this evolution, the protest (“the act of objecting or a gesture of disapproval“) has been portrayed as “compassion,” with words that can only accurately be described as meddling portrayed as “caring.” But it is still a fo…
Read More…eligious organization, and provides to the maximum extent possible for the free exercise of religion by all members of the military services who choose to do so.” The implication is that explicitly nonreligious servicemen and servicewomen are free to consult with a religious chaplain. But for the same reason that a Christian may prefer a Christian chaplain over a Muslim or Jewish chaplain, nonreligious people should be free to seek out assistance…
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…trictions is a matter of ongoing legal dispute. This should scare every American. As pandemic cases soar worldwide, with hundreds of thousands of Americans already dead from this virus, Barrett is virtually promising to allow churches to hold superspreader events every week—just like the superspreader event held at the White House to announce her nomination. This is reckless to the point of deadly and it clearly shows Barrett is unfit to be a judg…
Read More…s that there needs to be some “play in the joints.” There needs to be some freedom for government to act in this area without being subject to a claim from the other side – some freedom for government to make religious accommodations without being subject to Establishment Clause challenges, and some freedom on government’s part to enforce the values of the Establishment Clause without being subject to Free Exercise claims. That’s not to say how an…
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