Religion Dispatches
…n exemption from generally applicable laws that everyone else has to comply with, exemptions that are not envisioned or required by settled law on the Free Exercise Clause. “The state is making itself into a church.”=Um, what?…
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…abeled bigoted and narrow-minded. Yet many clamor to deny Muslins the very free exercise rights for which Sekulow, and now also his son Jordan, litigated, with the ACLJ leading the fight against the nonexistent effort by Muslims to take over America by implementing Sharia. We’re seeing the rhetoric around “religious freedom” as Christian privilege, the denial of which is framed as persecution from the Trump Administration—but there are at least tw…
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…helpfully references Tyler Stovall’s important work on the historical link between freedom and whiteness. Unfortunately, Anker fails to take sufficient notice of Stovall’s primary thesis, which addresses what is often considered the “paradox” at the heart of the founding of this great republic. His thesis maintains that the subjugation of people of color from the Enlightenment forward is no anomaly or paradox within the overall march of freedom bu…
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Along with freedom of religion, freedom of the press stands as one of the five fundamental freedoms in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. But what is the free press, as an institution, supposed to do? Theorists of democracy generally put forth the free press as a cornerstone of civil society. Media outlets inform readers on matters of public interest, sometimes exposing malfeasance and corruption in business or government. They also prov…
Read More…o it, thus far always killing them in the process. Craig himself was of no use to the program, as it turns out, because the ship responds to the pilot’s thoughts, and Craig was made unsuitable to be a pilot precisely because he didn’t want to leave the place where he is, and thus would not have caused the ship to launch. Eventually, in order to get the ship to shut down and disappear, Craig would have no choice but to put his hand on the ship’s co…
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…ating my religion,” you should feel free to tell them that their religious freedom ends where your own religious freedom and moral autonomy begin. The fundamental fact remains that you haven’t asked them to change their mind about anything; you’ve only asked them to leave you alone. If we want to have a functional pluralist society at all, we need people, broadly, to respect such boundaries. Stalking and harassment shouldn’t get a pass simply beca…
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…these contexts made me sick. Bush declared that he had to invade Iraq because God wanted to set people free. I paced our empty church and told the President: “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 assumpt…
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…t fail, or are overturned by courts, there has been a concerted attempt to use bogeymen (such as minorities committing voter fraud or Muslim terrorists) to justify certain actions. These are often promoted under the premise of upholding American values, when in reality they maliciously target the concept of equal citizenship in a democracy. What Trump has done is bring out into the open what had previously been done behind the scenes, or with litt…
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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…ve in the secular world. And if you’ve deconstructed to a healthier faith, free of authoritarianism, bigotry, sexism, and abuse—and if you’ve shed the tribalism and the need to impose and convert and separate the religious from the humane—you’re doing your part to better the world, too. I think deconstructed exvangelicals in particular have a lot to offer. The sect they escaped from is the most toxic politically in the United States; the source—al…
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