Religion Dispatches
…e guarantor that BP will make good on its promise to restore environments, businesses, and individuals. There’s a second irony to the “accidents happen” interpretation; that this is precisely what the libertarian theory of Paul and Perry seems to deny about individuals. If someone is poor, it seems to follow necessarily that she is to blame or at least that she alone is responsible. The same is true if someone is ill. The poor and the ill are resp…
Read MoreSince its inception, the Huffington Post’s business model has been one based on providing decent political reporting and serving as a liberal news aggregate of content assembled from around the internet. But in addition to its main news page, it has also built its success on the idea that it will let just about anyone write for them as long as they’re willing to do it for free. In exchange for all this unpaid content, columnists are largely free…
Read More…helping the jobless includes extending an array of special tax breaks for business while slashing spending at a range of federal agencies. Let it be noted that Congress has never before let unemployment benefits expire while the official jobless rate remains at such a high level. Meanwhile, the New York Times filled us in yesterday on the heavy lifting that Congress is willing to do before skipping town for a week. Robert Pear and Jeff Zeleny rep…
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…nce, her close ties to the Clinton administration, and several ill-defined business ventures, suggest that President Obama cares little about supporting religious freedom around the world. As Mark Silk put it succinctly, “This is the Religion Ambassador?” The Washington Post is carefully tiptoeing around the question of Rev. Cook’s appointment, quoting the first Ambassador-at-Large, Thomas Farr, who called Cook an outstanding pastor, but also lame…
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…e red wine in plastic cups by candlelight, I learned that the proprietor had recently been convicted of starting a fire in the building during a bout of depression. The hurricane had made things worse, but he was going to lose his business anyway. This man, whom I had just met and who would be in jail in a few days, refilled our cups. “Thank you for your support,” he said. We drank a toast. None of this was on the map, exactly, but it was what I…
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…sibly) that any such taxpayer-subsidized organization should not be in the business of endorsing political candidates. That’s the deal. Now if you persist in flouting the law, I invite you to do the honorable thing and surrender your church’s tax-exempt status. Then no one would quibble with your political endorsements. The other, more important reason that your appeal to Roger Williams is misguided, Rev. Williams, is that Roger Williams, founder…
Read More…tax records are available). Answers In Genesis remains the big boy in the business, far ahead of Creation Ministries International (from which AIG split a few years ago) and Institute for Creation Institute. AIG is the owner of the Kentucky-based Creation Museum, which features saddle-wearing dinosaurs and a recreation of Noah’s Ark built to biblical scale. Sadly, the gross revenue of National Center for Science Education, the primary defender of…
Read More…he 1964 Civil Rights Act need “further discussion” and may violate private business owners’ First Amendment rights, said that we wouldn’t really need laws in this country if everyone were a good Christian: I’m a Christian. We go to the Presbyterian Church. My wife’s a Deacon there and we’ve gone there ever since we came to town. I see that Christianity and values is the basis of our society. . . . 98% of us won’t murder people, won’t steal, won’t…
Read More…oh, dear: Ted Haggard’s back in the ministry business: whenever I see a religious leader who has gone through a crisis like Haggard’s starting a new church, returning to the pulpit after a relatively short interruption, or in some way continuing to offer himself as a religious leader, I don’t think “hooray for second chances,” I think, “there goes a narcissist.” And it’s not because I don’t believe in second chances, either. But it has to be cov…
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…—and the people offering the benefit are making money out of it. So it’s a business. And that’s very different from the traditional role of the Calvinists, or the Lutherans, or the Anglicans, or the Catholics. We know now that so-called prosperity preaching seemed to play a part in the real estate bust. People went to church and were told to buy things they couldn’t afford. I’m not surprised. Underlying that, of course, is a Protestant notion that…
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