Religion Dispatches
…erformed in Makkah at all but between Mina, Muzdhalifah, and Arafat. The stay at Arafat is the one thing you can only do during the twelfth month of the lunar calendar. That is what makes it hajj, the greater pilgrimage. Otherwise it is umrah, as it is at any other time of the year….
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…ination they face, and he called for some fundamental changes in religious freedom jurisprudence. What may have been personally “difficult” for Oaks was that he had to, for the first time in a very long time, adjust his rhetoric in order to appear palatable to the general public. He made the aforementioned language adjustments to appeal to—or avoid alienating—the new majority: people who support the expansion of anti-discrimination laws generally—…
Read More…d yet, when he wrote Democracy in America in the 1820s, Tocqueville was emphatic that Christianity was the one thing standing in the way of free market capitalism taking over the United States and ruining the morals of the citizens. He saw Christianity as providing a check on market logics. There have been times when certain forms of Christianity—that of the Transcendentalists in the 1830s and 40s, for instance—exhibited the potential for a gospel…
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…o would require them to take an uncomfortable look at their own theology. What is it that makes the leadership of an elite publication like The Atlantic see value in something like Moore’s new piece? Do its editors still, nearly eight years after the 2016 election, believe that America’s right-wing, mostly White evangelicals and similar authoritarian Christians are merely “misguided” souls who can be brought back to the light if they only find the…
Read More…ughters. We want a society that prays for them and condemns and eradicates hate crimes. That’s why we’re calling for equality, respect and tolerance,” the archbishop said. However, “this does not justify considering their unions analogous to a marriage between a man and a woman, the only union capable of bringing life into the world and which reflects the design of the creator.” Some lawmakers are also challenging the decision. Senator Ángel “Chay…
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…resident: “You just cut my umbilical cord to Christianity.” I had no idea what that meant. If President Bush was like a midwife, cutting my connection to those lifelong beliefs, then what new life was being born? Years later, Phil reminded me that someone else had freed us from our theological assumptions in a far more generous and life-giving way. In the year after Phil’s cancer diagnosis in 2005, we had begun to take comfort in the BBC documenta…
Read More…y. But what he said is important, and deserves to be expounded on, and so that’s what I’m going to do. Because I, like you, can imagine a universe in which Lindsey Graham is our President, and, well, let’s not think too hard about the Book of Revelation. I have a few questions, or rather concerns. The first of which is, what does Lindsey Graham mean by ‘I met a lot of liars’? Does he mean only working in the pool room, or in his years of service t…
Read More…get out of the education business if they could not fully respect academic freedom. He noted that in the old days, monks served as the original firemen. When a fire happened, the monastery bell rang and they all rushed off to the bucket brigade. This was a religious act. However, when the state and the community took up fire fighting, the monks abandoned the bucket brigade. Perhaps Dan and Peter have it right. If there are services that no one els…
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…others” and “ensuring that Americans receive the type of civics education that promotes tolerance and respect for all.” In short, a rehaul of the education, carceral, public health, and military systems of the United States, which is what my own concept of holistic justice calls for in my book, Homegrown Hate. Unlike my framework for advancing a new counterterrorism paradigm, this Strategy does not take into account the need to redress the inequit…
Read More…Public Integrity, the purpose of the company was to create Israel’s first “Free Export Processing Zone,” intended to promote business enterprise there. Contemporaneous news reports signaled the ideological heart of his efforts was to bring American-style conservatism to “socialist Israel:” “Israel is a country that was founded on statism, socialism and collectivism,” said David Yerushalmi, chairman and chief executive officer of the IEDC, which is…
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