Religion Dispatches
…h of Satan, headed by Magus Peter H. Gilmore, for being more interested in promoting their brand then in challenging the status quo. In early January the Temple released sketches of their statue. Peter Gilmore poo-pooed the design, saying it smacked of pedophilia. On Fox Business News, producer Bernard McGuirk suggested that Satanists should be lined in front of their statue and shot. Lawyers from the Satanic Temple demanded an apology. FEBRUARY I…
Read More…th case that brought us RFRA to begin with. The Satanic Temple’s print-and-sign web form for claiming a religious exemption to get out of having to listen to state-required biased counseling laws before obtaining an abortion. If only it were that easy. The member of a Mormon sect who claimed it would be against his religious beliefs to provide any factual information about the structure or hierarchy of his church to government officials investigat…
Read More…think it’s funny. “It really is just not funny at all,” said a Catholic monsignor in Indianapolis, after two drunk 26-year-olds were arrested heisting a nativity at his church. “What can you say? Just, simply no things are sacred any more.” It’s arguable, though, that it’s that hint of sacrilege that makes it funny. In Fargo, where the thieves have not been caught, the crime was credited to “delinquents who surely have a rich sense of irony.” Stea…
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…Weick searches through the flotsam of our postmodern consumerist world for signs of his presence. It is comforting, even pleasurable, to find signs. We love realizing there is an arrow hidden in the FedEx logo, or that the eastern coast of South America fits snugly into the western coast of Africa. We want to know there is order, even if that order is malevolent. Satan, New World Order, Illuminati—any order is better than none. This is why, at the…
Read More…licy circles in North America and Europe and by many academics invested in promoting religious freedom). It is, rather, an inescapably context-bound, polyvalent concept unfolding within divergent histories in differing political orders. This realization has led us to pose a number of crucial questions to those engaged in the promotion of religious freedom as a stable and singular human right. These questions, explored in detail in the PoRF volume…
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…lso came and had champagne with me. The bond was not broken. That’s a good sign of maturity in the culture. You have a lot of historical information and theological background in this book that religion students would already know. So was this for a more mainstream audience? I wrote it because I was annoyed with some writers because I knew they knew better. I said, “There’s bad faith here.” These people are supplying the data but they go along wit…
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…cemakers. So rather than donning cut-off jeans and angrily pumping a peace sign while marching in the streets, he quietly modeled compassion as the antidote to violence, This does not mean he rolled over in a namby-pamby way, as the folk singer Pete Seeger once described him. Rogers might have sounded and looked wimpy, but he was fiercely dedicated to a pacifism rooted in human dignity for all. The strength of this conviction led him to create a p…
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…itics infer that Bat-Jephthah knows the stakes of the game: she has seen a sign of mourning in her father’s rent garments, and she laments her own demise. Still, I wonder. Did she know the pain of her fate? Did she, like Shireen, scream upon her pyre? I wish it were harder to draw analogies between Shireen’s fictional burning and the fires of reality. I wish that Weiss’ quote did not, for me, evoke the #blacklivesmatter campaign. I wish that Kalie…
Read More…that his very willingness to help reach a satisfactory accommodation is a sign that his dedication to his religion is insufficient to justify an accommodation. Is the idea that only the most inflexible and rigid should be deemed religiously committed enough to receive an accommodation–even though they are those least likely to accept being accommodated rather than absolutely exempted? In other words, if we require purity of religious devotion we…
Read More…ves busy predicting when Trump will hit his “polling ceiling,” he shows no sign of giving up his lead in the polls. Far from hitting a “polling ceiling,” many are now rightly worried that Trump has found his “polling floor.” For Christians, Trump’s persistent presence in the GOP primary should be a concern. The fact that he has duped even a small fraction of the faithful into actively supporting his campaign should be cause for even more worry. Ma…
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