Religion Dispatches
…the law. It is directly on point to consider whether Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood would have been granted status as “persons” under something called the Political Freedom Restoration Act. RD contributing editor Austin Dacey will be writing a series of posts in the coming months as part of a joint project between The Immanent Frame and Religion Dispatches made possible by the generosity of the Luce Foundation….
Read More…are bracing for the worst. “Our time is coming,” one researcher told Human Rights Watch. “There will be a crackdown on NGOs, and we all expect to end up in prison soon. We know this is our fate, and we have accepted it.” RD contributing editor Austin Dacey will be writing a series of posts and essays in the coming months as part of a joint project between The Immanent Frame and Religion Dispatches made possible by the generosity of the Luce Founda…
Read More…in religious affairs. Likewise, Egyptians of all faiths and none are entitled to freedom of religion and conscience and equal treatment under the law. What title for this position would be more apt than secularism? RD contributing editor Austin Dacey will be writing a series of posts in the coming months as part of a joint project between The Immanent Frame and Religion Dispatches made possible by the generosity of the Luce Foundation. Click here…
Read More…ds of extremists and the unqualified.” The removal of thousands of clerics—numbering 12,000, according to the government’s statement—comes in the context of the ongoing struggle between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military-backed regime. Outside observers of this struggle may be tempted to frame it as a contest between an Islamist theocracy and a secular state, albeit an alarmingly iron-fisted one. However, as revealed in a discussion of the fu…
Read More…that the belief was sincerely held. Justice Alito’s opinion did clarify a number of other things that are not relevant to assessing a claim of “substantial burden.” First, it is not relevant that “alternative means of practicing religion” are available. The state does not get to decide whether a claimant’s religious impulses can be satisfied through some other outlet. Second, it does not matter whether the practice is considered religiously oblig…
Read More…r” as an “eminently malleable category that can be deployed to advance any number of competing ends.” Perhaps when she claims that the category of religion has reached the end of its useful life, Sullivan is not suggesting that it serves no one’s purposes, but rather that it serves no defensible purposes. Perhaps hers is fundamentally a moral case, a case about the injustice of protecting “religious freedom.” Then the claim would not be that such…
Read More…es. But stretched too far, they can become “nothing more than lies.” Her project is a far more foundational challenge, a challenge to the very idea of “Religion” as a category under the law. RD contributing editor Austin Dacey will be writing a series of posts in the coming months as part of a joint project between The Immanent Frame and Religion Dispatches made possible by the generosity of the Luce Foundation….
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…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…
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…ad to leave to survive. I recall the grace I felt as a graduate student in Austin, Texas, when I first turned to a little neighborhood Methodist church. Finding that church saved my life. The first time I took communion there as an openly gay man was the most profound religious experience of my life, much more than my baptism as a boy—that dunk in the cold baptistery during a gospel revival was more a flight from hell and from my growing sense of…
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…among Native American tribes and it was here that city founder Stephen F. Austin signed a treaty establishing boundaries for Texas settlers. With tremendous effort and money, an outraged community managed to save their sacred tree, while Cullen received a nine-year prison sentence. According to some accounts, he had sacrificed the tree as part of a love spell. Exactly whose love he so desperately sought varies from story to story. 1997, White Cli…
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