Religion Dispatches
…blical requirements, however, he did not view it as inherently immoral. By promoting McDowell, and by extension Rushdoony, Barton promotes a “biblical worldview” in which slavery is in some circumstances acceptable. This worldview (like his discussion of the three-fifths rule, which minimizes the rule’s dehumanization of slaves) diminishes the dehumanization of slavery in general by explicitly arguing that God condones it in certain circumstances….
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…Western-style political leaders like the Shah. We live in that world still today, and it is in this sense that we did not need the September 11 attacks to learn that a certain form of neotraditional religiosity was alive and well around the world. What happened in the new century, and what has taken up a great deal of our cultural attention in the past decade, is that certain forms of neo-traditional religion became increasingly violent, very fas…
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…—and I smiled yet again that anyone would imagine the workings of Congress today conforming in any way to what was once taught in 9th grade civics class. For what is “possible” now is not a finely-tuned melding of various good ideas representing different viewpoints on how tackle public policy challenges. Not even close. As no other legislative spectacle demonstrates quite so well as the health care “debate,” the overwhelming driver of policymakin…
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…Islam propaganda they will encounter from groups like TTT. 6. Get Involved Today’s public school students need to be prepared to function effectively not only in a global society that is already religiously diverse, but also in a United States that is growing more so. Since religions continue to shape human viewpoints and motivations, students need a solid grasp of the religions of the world. One thing I learned from participating in the 2014 text…
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…ore. More than that, the nature of everyday life for most of us in America today is deadly for the world around us. The machines that facilitate our daily life exploit the fossil fuel spoils of the underworld, slowly turning the planet into a kind of living hell. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose knew that, even if many of us choose to ignore that it’s happening; phenomena like mass species extinctions are affecting us deeply. Rose argued that in t…
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…cient for most people in their contemplation of supernatural other-spaces, today more and more people rely upon mediated worlds for this sense of voluntary displacement. So to see Manhattan itself go belly-up after the storm, to watch how carnal we become when met with loss of power, has been a sobering and a saddening experience. All of this has made me think more squarely about how inured we have become to screens as the mediator of our imaginat…
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…a,” he said, “because worldviews hardly ever change,” not much has changed today—except for Noebel’s expanded definition of communism. “We used to say communism equals Marxism-Leninism,” he told Olasky. “Now communism is a broader term—I have a whole list of things to add today.” The Democratic Party’s “Socialist Red Army” Noebel insists that President Obama is a “stealth socialist,” and even that Obama economic advisor Larry Summers, in acknowled…
Read More…lorification of man on the mind. Christopher Lasch’s question is as urgent today as it was when he posed it 18 years ago in his book The True and Only Heaven How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once in for all? Reitan raises in separate chapters the key arguments that atheists have used or attacked, including theories of…
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…n goods would hasten the end of the modern public art museum as we know it today. But again, the Greeks insist that this case is unique, not a precedent-setter. The case is even more complicated because when Elgin endeavored to sell the collection to the British government, the Parliament held three months of hearings to determine: 1) whether the pieces were rightfully Elgin’s to sell; 2) how much such an unprecedented collection was actually wort…
Read More…t over Ryan’s budget.) Ryan has been making the rounds of late, and again today at Georgetown, arguing that leaving future generations with government debt would be the truly immoral thing to do. He told the Eternal Word Television Network recently, “If we keep growing government in debt, we will crowd out the civil society — those charities, those churches, those institutions in our local communities that do the most to actually have a human tou…
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