…ous. It’s difficult to encapsulate the scope of the suffering created by Comstock laws. A chronicle of these harms could fill volumes, but two snapshots of pregnancy planning under Comstock will have to suffice. Six decades after their instantiation, Comstock laws still had an informational chokehold on contraceptives and abortifacients. It’s worth remembering that, despite legal restrictions, couples in the 1930s sought to plan parenthood as best…
…read to ban all known forms of contraception: withdrawal, the use of condoms or diaphragms, douching after intercourse, and folk contraceptive potions. However, the pope appeared to give approval to a birth control method that had been rattling around since the ancient Greeks but had seen a spike in interest since the discovery of female ovulation in the mid-1800s: timing sexual intercourse to coincide with a woman’s naturally occurring sterile p…
…lot of money to cull through tapes and videos of conferences and TV programs and the Internet to look for information that is critical of Muslims and Muslim-Americans getting involved in public policy. They compile that into a guilt-by-association Powerpoint and then shop it to reporters.” These individuals include, said Khan, Frank Gaffney, who issues baseless warnings to members of Congress about “creeping shari’ah;” Paul Sperry, co-author of t…
…e past quarter century has been its laser-like focus on a relatively small number of interrelated issues. The religious left would need to define its agenda priorities clearly and precisely in order to earn concrete policy victories. Nor am I convinced that we should write an obituary for the religious right. As Dionne notes in Souled Out, “The end of the religious right does not signal a decline in evangelical Christianity” (p. 4). Far from it: e…
…sure softball questions, few dissident voices, and reverent talk about the number of ciboria necessary to serve communion in baseball stadiums. And, we are all supposed to know what ciboria are (for the record, they are the goblet-shaped metal vessels that hold the hosts—that is, the wafers—used for communion). Catholic terminology is about the only thing used liberally in these exercises. Television hosts like Tim Russert fairly swoon over their…
…dst dinosaurs. Bible institutes and Christian colleges continue to grow in number and size, with at least some of them offering degrees in biology and science education in creation-friendly environments. Most of this activity occurs within the nation’s conservative Christian subculture largely invisible to those outside it. When creationists reach beyond the church to challenge the teaching of evolution in public schools—as they have in Kansas, Pe…
…ined only through the lexicon of liberal rights as a set of discrete freedoms claimed by individuals or groups from an assumedly neutral state? What claims can and cannot be made regarding religion, personhood, and freedom? What modes of religiosity, notions of religious difference (or non-difference), and idioms of social order and harmony are rendered unintelligible or incoherent? My forthcoming book, Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Pol…
…God originally threatened to permanently destroy Israel. It may be that a number of today’s Jews, religious and nonreligious alike, who see ongoing genocide in Gaza will view a violent nation-state as a golden calf to be rejected. These anti-Zionists, castigated as non-Jews and antisemites, may ironically find themselves rejoining the historical mainstream of Jewish religious tradition documented by Ravitzky. ¹ Song of Songs Rabbah 2:7, Babylonia…
By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston
…to build up and centralize itself. This type of totalizing perspective seems common to most religious systems. Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and even early Christianity teach a way of life that does not compartmentalize but which seeks power (intentionality, obedience, service and control) for God. The “genius” of the Protestant Revolution was to break apart this unitary system and its divine focus, substituting it with spheres of influence (with grea…
…ry will on her reproductive life. As far as empathy is concerned, there seems to be scant evidence that Rick Warren and many other evangelical writers have tried to put themselves in the woman’s position, or that they can imagine what it would be like to have to make that decision. We always hear the phrase, “to fully understand a man, one has to walk a mile in his shoes.” Surely that good advice means we should also walk a mile in a woman’s shoes…
