Religion Dispatches
…vernment, perhaps a unity coalition guaranteed by the military, leading to free and fair elections after the shortest time possible within which campaigning can be organized. This requires all the stakeholders on the ground, who are not representatives of the dictatorship, to come to the table, and to receive guarantees both from one another but also from regional powers who can help nudge the process forward. The military has won itself a seat at…
Read More…e Church complained and appeared to suggest it might boycott the company’s services. According to 9News, “Telstra currently holds contracts for all the Catholic schools in Australia.” After many customers complained that the company had caved to pressure from the church, Telstra said it had not changed its position in favor of equality but would refrain from public advocacy during the proposed plebiscite to give everyone “an opportunity to contrib…
Read More…similar but far more significant quandary. The nightmare scenario involves free and fair elections in Egypt that put a “radical” Islamist government into power. This government then enacts foreign policy decisions hostile to US (and Israeli) interests and hence serves to “destabilize the region.” The US and Israel lose a key ally in the region, ushering in a new period of unrest. Forestalling this scenario, commentators are arguing that this is n…
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…a young man’s desire to do “splendid, brilliant, poetic things,” so as to “free some hilarious and potent spirit within him” is a religious parable, of a sort. Reading it today tells us something about the vagaries of God and Mammon in the Steel City, a story worth considering whether you’re from Pittsburgh or not. “Paul’s Case” doesn’t appear in my book An Alternative History of Pittsburgh—a gross oversight (perhaps justification for a sequel), f…
Read More…mmensely polite attitude of people searching those coming into Tahrir. The free teas that were spreading all around Tahrir, no doubt paid for through the charitable support of someone in the crowd, or donated by the tea-shop owner – its just another part of the Egypt I have always known. But the Egypt I have known would never have seen people feeling free to voice their criticisms of the president so strongly or openly – that type of attitude cert…
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…ment (or the expenditure of tax dollars). As Loughner explains, algebra is free. Charging a student for an algebra class amounts to selling a free product and is a scam. If the world worked properly, grammar and currency would convey real value without distortion. But because of government practices of mind control and currency fraud, they do not. As a way out of these misrepresentations, individuals need to learn to dream, a practice that he lab…
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…e nothing. Like I was a ghost. But it also made me feel giddy, joyful, and free. I could not take my eyes from it. Night after night, I took the Time-Life book to bed with me and I read it until I could read no more. This quiet but transformative introduction to deep time started me off on a terrific three-year-long obsession with dinosaurs and evolution and geology and astronomy. Other encounters with nature had similar effects on me: They made m…
Read More…that allows for pluralism of belief and experience: offer special worship services, sermons, education programs, and social media outreach efforts that critically engage the tensions between freedom and liberty in religious practice and American citizenship; take a stand in the pulpit for the legal and moral place of competing religious convictions; explicitly honor the lives of women and children by calling for the provision of adequate healthca…
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…op a social and educational theory that could harmonize maximum individual freedom with maximum social solidarity. Durkheim was also in the intellectual elite, dedicated like all his colleagues to cultivating the most refined bourgeois values. Yet as an advocate of individual freedom and as a Jew with relatively newly-minted political rights, he also had to promote the democracy of the Third Republic against its ultra-nationalist conservative crit…
Read More…Smith jurisprudence,” she wrote. RFRA didn’t expand the scope of religious freedom rights, and in the case law there is “no support for the notion that free exercise rights pertain to for-profit corporations.” There’s a reason for that, Ginsburg maintained. While the Constitution and the courts have long recognized a “special solicitude” for religious organizations, there is no such solicitude for commercial entities. The reason for that is “hardl…
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