Religion Dispatches
…interactive nature of communications, he says, relativizes the distinction between producer and consumer so that “communication appears not only as an exchange of data, but also as a form of sharing.” The Pope’s recent creation of a personal Twitter account in December 2012 seems to have been an attempt to engage with this interactive world without compromising papal authority (though as Elizabeth Drescher notes here on RD, this is a nearly imposs…
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…that I guess? Look, it’s hard to argue that the Biden campaign didn’t do a better job of faith outreach than Clinton’s campaign did. But that also needs to be put in the context of Clinton herself: we know that Christians overall and particularly evangelicals are not as friendly to women leaders as secular folks are, and we know that Clinton has been relentlessly demonized for decades. It’s hard to say for sure, then, but it’s entirely possible th…
Read More…who has spoken at tea party rallies and who claimed at Michele Bachmann’s Code Red rally against health care reform that health care reform was “against the law of nature and nature’s God” and “against the Judeo-Christian ethic that this nation was built upon.” Broden also appears in Maafa 21, a propaganda film that claims that reproductive rights are a conspiracy to commit “black genocide.” The film has been promoted by the Frederick Douglass Fo…
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…ayer of my persuasion (we’ll call her Petra from Yuma) finds using the tax code to benefit such schools offensive to the First Amendment. In the past, Petra from Yuma could go into court to challenge the tax credit as a form of state-subsidized religion. But Petra (or a Thomas Jefferson redivivus, for that matter) is now out of luck. The core issue is whether providing the tax credit has the exact same practical impact as simply giving tax revenue…
Read More…the most tolerant toward homosexuality, while a connection can be observed between societies in which religion tends to hold a central position and greater intolerance in this area. As a citizen of a democracy that is still young, allow me to show how proud I am of the level to which Spain accepts homosexuality and to recognize how valuable this acceptance is. Because I do not believe that tolerance can be divided. There is no middle ground betwee…
Read More…America. But speakers at today’s press conference suggested the church has better options. “Surely Archbishop Oscar Romero is a more worthy candidate for the Hispanic peoples of the Americas,” said Norma Louise Flores, author of a MoveOn.org petition opposing the canonization. Steven Newcomb, co-founder and co-director of the Indigenous Law Institute and author of Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, connected…
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…r backers of the proposal based on their “blackmail tone.” Georgia’s Civil Code already defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The purpose of the now rejected referendum was to write the same specification into the Constitution, effectively banning same-sex marriage. Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili has promised that if the Georgian Dream Party wins a sufficient majority in the October 8 election, a constitutional ban on same-se…
Read More…icrobe cells, mutated cells. We are built, too, of our parents, of genetic code and flesh and blood and bones that grow inside of flesh and blood and bones. So we come again to the parents: “There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re sixteen, and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer,” Hazel tells us. Green, who is now the parent of two children, told The New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot, that his own…
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…is speech, assured his Turkish audience that he understands the difference between religious claims and Constitutional claims. And in so saying, he was implicitly reminding them of the value of American-style secularism to the current situation in Turkey. One Religion, Indivisible What many of the religious voices raised in protest over President Obama’s speech assume is that America is a Christian nation, not a secular nation at all. And in so sa…
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…, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana became the first governor to sign an “academic freedom” bill into law. Observers on both sides of the issue are now waiting for the first school district in the state to adopt a curriculum based on this new language. Of course, these academic freedom bills, along with the “teach the strengths and weaknesses” wording in Texas are merely a watered-down version of intelligent design—what Judge John E. Jones III, in his rul…
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