Religion Dispatches
…ple. It’s what you can do for yourself and others. As it is, White evangelical Protestants have it both ways. A vote for apartheid free of consequence, free of guilt….
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…amilton, “is about the agenda that started with Rosenberger of re-crafting Free Exercise claims that have no chance of winning into free speech claims.” In Rosenberger v. University of Virginia, decided in 1995, the Court ruled that a public university engaged in “viewpoint discrimination” when it refused to fund religious clubs on the grounds that such funding might appear to be an endorsement of a particular religious group, in violation of the…
Read More…“Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.” I am with Milton here: The freer the press, the less the innocent have to fear and the more the guilty need to be worried. We’d like to think so. But the rub, as Miller argues, is that all too often the light merely shines on crafty rhetoric. Read Miller’s piece here. *Ingrid Schlueter resigned, sh…
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…a long time. Indeed, what comes up first in a Google search for Religious Freedom Day is ReligiousFreedomDay.com, the work of a California-based Christian right agency called Gateways to Better Education. This group is part of a wider movement that seeks to evangelize children in public schools—as detailed in Katherine Stewart’s book, The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children. Gateways states that they work w…
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…just communists, but also “those organizations and men who have aided and abetted the cause of Communism by word or deed, whether intentionally or unintentionally.” The “entire left-wing movement,” which included the liberal National Council of Churches, “is of the devil.” Speaking at the 1962 Christian Crusade convention, after fulminating that the “Liberal Establishment” was the “greatest threat to freedom, New Testament Christianity, and consti…
Read More…ects no one. It restores no one’s civil rights. It advances no progressive agenda. May all of us—including Fred Karger—enjoy shame-free holidays and a shame-free 2012….
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…ive a speech and ring a 500-pound bell from a church founded by slaves and free blacks in 1776. Can you comment on the significance of this? As a gesture, as a symbol, it is so powerful. The bell is tangible, it’s this huge thing that’s traveled to the seat of power, Washington, D.C. It came from this community of enslaved people who could have never imagined in their lifetime an African American president or an African American museum in our nati…
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…e very survival of minority communities. As MASGD puts it, “none of us are free until all of us are free.” To get a sense of what motivates MASGD’s activism, particularly in the current political atmosphere, I interviewed four pioneers of the American LGBT Muslim movement: Faisal Alam, Urooj Arshad, Raquel E. Saraswati, and Tynan Power. These leaders are members of MASGD’s Steering Committee, and were gracious enough to discuss with me their appre…
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…the intellectuals knew it) in assuming that there was an inherent conflict between individual freedom and group well-being, between true democracy and the highest moral values. Why should we make those assumptions? Or, more precisely: Who would make those assumptions? There is a mass of research (which Haidt rejects, as noted above) to demonstrate the answer quite empirically: people who are afraid of rapid change, which they interpret as a threat…
Read More…on between church and state. The bishops would love to have the separation between church and state we thought we enjoyed just a few months ago, when we were free to run Catholic institutions in conformity with the demands of the Catholic faith, when the government couldn’t tell us which of our ministries are Catholic and which not, when the law protected rather than crushed conscience. The state is making itself into a church. Oh, to be able to p…
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