Religion Dispatches
…l you and your praying Congressional colleagues are, you can’t also run around acting like a bought and paid for coward without people reaching for their Bibles to search for where you might have found the scriptural basis for your self-serving gutlessness. “We just need to start acting better, and Jesus gives us the place to start,” was a gem from Pryor’s 2012 Prayer Breakfast speech. As Pryor himself has said, you don’t need to pass an IQ test t…
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…eproduction, maternity, pregnancy, miscarriage, and childbirth (which, incidentally, carry burdens enough on their own) are now recruited for the task of proclaiming deep truths about Sin/A Mother’s Love/Sacrifice/Nature/God’s Design/the Virtue of Pain/The Selfishness of Some Women/the Trinity/etc. Or, here, The Hypocrisy of Pro-Lifers. I don’t think that’s fair to impose on someone, to leer at them in that way, to demand that they obligingly prod…
Read More…th the process of making sure the folks who do need, the employees who are under accommodated employers will actually work.” O’Brien said it was “good news” that women would get the coverage they need under the accommodation — if it works as HHS has laid it out. “Let’s say,” said O’Brien, “you are in a university and there is a workaround — it’s good that you get coverage if it all works out. The devil is in the details. But the fact that you [th…
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…tate for the record: many archaeologists and geologists have discovered evidence for many different floods, some of them large, or sudden, or both. But they all have end points, high water marks if you will. They certainly did not cover the entire Earth. (Sorry, creationists.) So to say, as the Daily Mail did, that Ballard has discovered “A flood of Biblical proportions just like in the story of Noah’s Ark” is meaningless. The phrase “of biblical…
Read More…rtraying. Y’know, that Jesus who was “this little, wimpy guy who walked around plucking daisies and eating birdseed and saying nice things, but never doing anything controversial. The fact is, Jesus did confront his culture with truth—and he ended up being crucified because of it.” Actually, Jeffress is mostly right. If you don’t want a wimpy Jesus, then this rainbow-haloed baby Jesus is the one you want. A butch Jesus. You see, once this baby gre…
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…ve story about politics, and even more so about a politician who would not compromise on his most fundamental principle—even if he would test constantly the political winds on what would be needed to achieve that principle in practice. That’s a grown-up story about politics (notably here including Lincoln’s own qualms about the legality of the Emancipation Proclamation) that many viewers will appreciate. This is Lincoln as political realist, but o…
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…o argued, in some of his last lectures, that in a culture where the human being is understood to be the figure of sovereign authority—the figure that holds the reins of political power—divinity and animality bleed into one another in a kind of excluded space. The more powerful humanity becomes, in other words, the less power is held by those elements that humanity excludes, such as divinity or animality. The result, he suggests, is that we’re left…
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…n the legislation are many requirements that a woman must meet in order to undergo the procedure—undermining her decision-making process about her reproductive life. Instead of ensuring access, this extensive hoop-jumping creates unnecessary barriers to what will be a legal medical procedure. Requirement 1: A woman seeking an abortion must first meet with a panel of professionals, consisting of a gynecologist, a psychologist, and a social worker,…
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…ny religion.” Although the new order is backed up by military law, Mikey Weinstein, founder of and force behind the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), remains skeptical: It was a transparent and likely guilt-ridden concession by Schwartz, yet it was both too little and too late. With Schwartz’s butt-covering, last second, ‘midnight drive-by’ delivery of AFI 1-1, we have no alternative left but to look to the new USAF Chief of Staff, G…
Read More…ts’ “purges of God” are “not in keeping with our founding documents, our founding vision.” It sounds like Ryan has been reading the supremely misleading David Barton. The same goes for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who said in his GOP convention address that “faith in our Creator is the most important American value of all.” Of course, God is not actually named in the U.S. Constitution—and it wasn’t an oversight. Founders considered and rejected attem…
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