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In 2012 Bishops Join Fight to Repackage Discrimination as ‘Religious Freedom’

By Sarah Posner

…ook his charges into conspiratorial territory, telling reporters that “well-financed, well-oiled sectors” were attempting to “push religion back into the sacristy.” Unlike recent efforts to address poverty or “urge” Congress to extend unemployment benefits, this campaign will not essentially consist of clerics issuing recommendations. Staffed with ten of the Bishops’ brethren, the Ad Hoc Committee will be assisted by the USCCB’s former top lawyer…

Blood and Hammers: Elderly Anti-Nuclear Activists Sentenced to Jail

By Kristen Tobey

…hich illuminates the ways in which the actions are meant to function. Trial-as-referendum The Plowshares Eight and the Disarm Now Plowshares were apprehended immediately. Several Plowshares groups over the years, though, have had to wait for some time to be noticed. Yet they do wait, because being arrested and going to trial are important components of the action, as was established in the weeks and months following the first action in 1980. Charg…

Virtual Islam: Peace, Love, and Some Understanding?

By Bill Berkowitz

…e gamut of professions: Web site news editors, librarians, architects, stay-at-home moms, teachers, lawyers, college students, journalists, writers, counselors, clerics, bloggers. The new economy—or the one that is transforming into a new economy as we are all witnessing—is redefining “common.” Against the backdrop of the repeated failed efforts by the Bush administration at public diplomacy, where does your work fit in? Many of the criticisms of…

What a Forgotten 19th Century Suffragist Can Teach Us About Women’s Rights vs. The Religious Right

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…ments came in the form of a letter he wrote to the New York Mail & Express, 19 April, 1890, and reprinted in the American Sentinel in July of that year. The Sentinel was an Adventist publication, and while they too wanted to see the coming Day of the Lord, they were against the political work of constitutional amendments, calling out Blair’s “spirit of religious despotism and intolerance” and saying he and his cohorts worked with “mediaeval method…

Obama Changes Course on Islam

By Hussein Rashid

…in fact they are nothing more than murderers, including the murder of thousands upon thousands of Muslims. This is why Muslim leaders around the world have spoken out—forcefully, and often at great risk to their own lives—to reject al Qaeda and violent extremism. And frankly, their condemnations often do not get the recognition they deserve, including from the media. The new strategy continues to emphasize America’s security, but does so by build…

The Heresy of Compromise

By Peter Manseau

…eous in religion.” While Jefferson is generally thought to have been a live-and-let-live sort when it came to competing spiritual doctrines, in his Notes on the State of Virginia he took a more radical stance. “The several sects,” he wrote, “perform the office of censor morum over each other.” Conflicting religious positions, in other words, develop in collaboration—in compromise. Like the bishop who suggested his church should adapt to meet the n…

Historian John Ragosta Discusses the Context and Inspiration for ‘Religious Freedom’ in the U.S.

By Frederick Clarkson

…d upon it to for 140 years to define religious freedom [since Reynolds vs. United States, 1879], but it played a critical role in development of the First Amendment and in the way the states defined religious freedom. It was far better known in the nineteenth century when historians, students, newspaper editors and politicians regularly turned to the Statute to understand religious liberty. Its history is equally important: After the American Revo…

‘Open Mosque’ in South Africa Receives Threats; ‘Blood Test’ for ‘Degeneratism’: Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…said Bangladesh also objected to the ICPD proposal to provide children aged 12-13 years comprehensive sexuality education programs. “If we allow comprehensive sexuality education programs, then we have to teach our school-going children, with video presentation, how to have sex,” he said. According to Gay Asia News, 90 percent of the 155 million people in Bangladesh are Muslim, and same-sex relations are banned under the penal code “left behind by…

Liberal Christians Come Out Swinging at Trump, Mostly

By Daniel Schultz

…g mass deportations, or sit idly in the face of racial profiling of African-Americans, Latinos and religious minorities. Perhaps I’m biased, because (full disclosure) it’s my denomination and I’ve known John Dorhauer, President and General Minister of the United Church of Christ, for a long time. But Dorhauer posted what I thought was perhaps the strongest response to Trump’s election so far: Because this election sharply separated us over matters…

Honey, I Shrunk the Church: The Vatican Manages Sexual Abuse, Canonization and the Nuns

By Mary E. Hunt

…state shrinks right up to nothing when liability lurks. In early 2014, the United Nations’ Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which monitors implementation of that Convention, questioned Vatican officials about sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic clergy and its systematic cover-up by church officials. Former sex crimes prosecutor for the Church, Monsignor Charles Scicluna, in watershed testimony, admitted that the Vatican bore some respo…