Religion Dispatches
…next man. Nice. But I hope you noticed I said man to men, and I don’t ever use the word unless explicitly male. I never use that word for human being, person, or humanity as whole. That gives people too much license whether to include women as persons or human beings, so I just don’t do it. But here it is intentional. Well, I think about the idea of hajj as a visit before the king. Men, who are basically used to certain predominance in society, if…
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…anyone shows up. For space reasons I won’t go into The Family’s multiple abuses of the religious tax exemption. Many RD readers will be familiar with the story of their notorious townhouse on C Street in Washington, which for many years got away with being a tax-exempt “church” even though it actually functioned as a private club for powerful members of Congress who paid a nominal rent to live there. But this abuse pales compared to the major crim…
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…comedies in which Chico and Harpo are running a slick little scam. They’ve used a fishing pole to hook a dollar bill. Chico uses the money to buy something. The seller then pockets the bill. As soon as he starts to walk off, Harpo deftly pulls back on his pole, retrieving the money and delivering it to Chico: who then turns around and uses it to scam the next customer. How many of our charitable contributions are like that? Even after we’ve handed…
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…nt levels of “strictness.” For example, if the modern state ever wishes to use racial categories in making policy, then, because of our checkered and very bloody racial history, these discriminating laws and policies will be subject to the very strictest scrutiny. (That is what has bedeviled affirmative action policies of late; even using such categories for the noblest of purposes is Constitutionally suspect, at least at the outset.) If the state…
Read More…would that lead to?” another Amish man asked me. “We don’t want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a telephone. It’s not just how you use the technology that concerns us. We’re also concerned about what kind of person you become when you use it.” Just so. Sigh….
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…of trade are political. American manufacturing workers lost their jobs because of our political submissiveness, not because of the product cycle. China and Mexico have taken us to the cleaners. Trump is no market liberal: The free market is anything but. So he would naturally use the state’s power to countermand the property rights of corporations who export their jobs and plants abroad. He attributes his own market failures to his lack of power….
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…’t really different from other advocacy groups in this respect. I wouldn’t use the words “tricky” or “manipulative,” because those words imply that there’s a certain moral ineptness inherent in chaos rhetoric. What I’d claim, rather, is what I said earlier: most of us tolerate chaos rhetoric quite well when it’s being used by a group that we like. In other words, various methods of persuasion (in this case, chaos rhetoric) are called “tricky” or “…
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…to spread all over the place, no one felt much like fishing anymore, and Kruse, like many other Gulf captains in his position, was forced to work for BP to help with the cleanup operation. Kruse signed himself and his boat, “The Rookie,” up for the “Vessel of Opportunity” program, through which BP contracts independent captains to use their private vessels to perform tasks such as laying down “booms,” skimming and burning oil off the surface, ferr…
Read More…rong. The first sentence is somewhat—what’s the right word? Hilarious? Because of course no one has said that “bureaucrats” should tell someone whether they can use contraceptives or not. If he’s trying to speak to his own base—which is likely, given his use of the word “bureaucrat”—he’s got their fears all wrong. Conservatives aren’t saying they’re worried about “bureaucrats” taking their contraceptives away, conservatives are saying they’re worr…
Read More…abies,” as Bray put it. He was careful to say that he did not advocate the use of violence, but morally approved of it in some instances. He was “pro-choice,” as he put it, regarding its use. Bray found support for his position in actions undertaken during the Nazi regime in Europe. His moral exemplar in this regard was the German theologian and Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who abruptly terminated his privileged research position at Union…
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