Religion Dispatches
…played decisive roles in stopping the war in Vietnam, pushing for African American and women’s rights, and much more. The Beltway Insiders would prefer not to have a resurgent Religious Left complicating things by making conservative evangelicals uncomfortable and perhaps more importantly, compelling significant changes in the way the politics and public policy industry does business. So I think a faux Religious Left is being manufactured as an o…
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…o exceptions: charitable loans (for which interest may not be charged) and business loans (which effectively form business partnerships between people contributing capital and people contributing ideas and/or labor). The Bible requires a system of “just weights and measures;” for North, manipulation of those weights and measures (such as the Fed does) violates biblical principles. North argues that the Bible prohibits what he calls “multiple indeb…
Read More…r example, one’s adult daughter’s sexual history is not entirely one’s own business. (In fact, maybe one’s teenage daughter’s sexual behavior isn’t entirely one’s own business, at least not to the point of embarrassing her and her boyfriend by demanding they sign an explicit written contract detailing which behaviors are off-limits. [cough] VICTORIA! [/cough]) Going by the second definition, Teryn, the 30-year-old Koloff daughter, has the healthie…
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…merous scholars argue about all “rights” legislation: that they are in the business of shoring up difference in the interests of private property. The swath of Republican leaders who signed on to a February amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of marriage equality reveals how same-sex marriage is now squarely associated with the notions of limited government and the free market. (Ironically, because the Church views traditional marriage as…
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…ut the movie business and life and religion and faith. Faith and the movie business,” Ethan Coen told an interviewer. In another interview, they promised that the film in development would answer big questions: “‘It’s big,’ says Ethan, grinning. ‘We’re interested in the big questions. And we don’t (expletive) around with subtext. This one especially. Though their movies usually revel in the absurdity of life’s predicaments, Ethan promises this fil…
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…pitalist, who spent his life buoyed by his father’s fortune and the family business he took over, and who spends the season believing himself to be, literally, too good even for heaven. This is a man who lacks a moral compass, who, it is very strongly implied, regularly sexually harassed his employees, and who spent his life in the pursuit of nothing beyond power and glory. While the show takes significant time to point out many of his individual…
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…of Infernal Names, now secularized, grows ever longer: Big Government, Big Business, Big Pharma, Big Food. These are complex systems, of course—too complex to serve as satisfying scapegoats. But through the alchemy of capital letters we transform them into fairy-tale caricatures of corruption and deceit, villains that help to make sense of it all. My own Satan has always been Big Business. For many years, I nurtured a hatred of profit-driven corpo…
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…r acting than their religious commitments, and a real understanding of the business of movies. The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court. Paul Lalonde got the rights to make the movie again and decided to reboot the franchise, this time taking the approach LaHaye and Jenkins had recommended originally: a big-budget, wide-release, Hollywoodized version of this evangelical version of the apocalypse. This time, Left Behind would be a commercial…
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…zy weekday morning in the Raleigh-Durham Airport and I am returning from a business trip I didn’t really want to take. I am dressed in business casual. I’m about as threatening as your average Gund creation. Having a total stranger employed by the government narrate just how he’s going to touch you is strangely erotic in a nation so squeamish about frank discussions of sexuality; especially involving same-gender touching. In public. Yet, here I st…
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…obby for. With respect to religious exemptions, the report notes that most Americans (63%) “oppose allowing small business owners to refuse service to LGBTQ people if doing so violates their religious beliefs.” By contrast, per PRRI: “white evangelical Protestants remain the only major religious group in which a majority favors religiously based service refusals, and their support for these exemptions is increasing. A majority of white evangelical…
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