Religion Dispatches
…ext time and a next time until an alternate vision of society—one that remixes religion, politics and economics into a more communal and collective venture, stirs hearts, minds and votes for a better America. Like this story? Your tax-deductible $5 or $10 will help us pay writers, coders, interns, and editors. And will earn you our endless gratitude….
Read More…o groups. SEPTEMBER September was a busy month. The Satanic Temple filed a Freedom of Information Act request and obtained a file of communications from citizens regarding their plan to erect a Baphomet statue on the grounds of the Oklahoma capital. Sadly, almost none of the angry writers or callers seemed to understand that the issue at stake was the establishment clause and whether any religious group should be able to have monuments on capital…
Read More…lity courses, yoga courses, or zen courses, but none of those things would free the person to be like a child of God. Only the Holy Spirit, according to Francis, has the power to break the hardness of the heart and make it docile toward God and free to love. Given the frequent Catholic and evangelical yogaphobic moments in recent history, I asked myself if the Pope’s remarks were yogaphobic, but I concluded that yogaphobia did not appear to be at…
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…oul of their ideology. When the logical endpoint of your understanding of “freedom of religion” is state-sanctioned violence against othered people, I contend that you’re doing freedom of religion wrong. This will bring us back to the prominent theologian I mentioned at the beginning of this article. (You didn’t think I was going to forget about him, did you?) Presbyterian Church of America minster, author, and apologist Tim Keller—he of “sex outs…
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…we could, to support this president despite his continuous assaults on the free press, his overtures to white nationalists, his human rights violations at the border, and his anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ policies, is morally despicable regardless of motive. People may lie to themselves as well as to pollsters about their own motives. Facing complicity in such enormous cruelty represents a serious ego threat, but if evangelicals want to be taken serio…
Read More…—but you deserved it. Many Muslims, especially in Muslim countries, bounce between various mosques, looking for better khutbahs (see entry before last), awesome qira’ah (Qur’an recitation), or good-looking ‘sisters’—we don’t date our actual sisters; calm down, right-wing. If they’re leaving roundabout taraweeh, that special late-night Muslim prayer, you already know something about their attitude to faith. Good pick-up lines include, “What’s your…
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…enry must have. Of course, even if Republicans have taken an otherwise healthy skepticism to a mad extreme, Democrats should take care not to become fanatically loyal to an infallible elite. One hopes, for the sake of American democracy, that we can together strike a wise balance between suspicion and deference with respect to expertise. The greater danger right now is brazen suspicion run amok. Unfortunately, as the history of the Reformation sho…
Read More…t Amendment has any meaning, it is that the government cannot suppress the free speech because it — or anyone else — disagrees with the speech.” The Thomas More Law Center has pledged to file a suit on Jones’ behalf. By the way, I’ve seen TMLC in action. Its lawyers defended the Dover school board in Kitzmiller v Dover. If Jones has any brains at all – and I’m not saying he does – he’ll get on the phone to the ACLU right now, begging its attorneys…
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…ity, the ability to live alongside our Creator for all time, to accept the free gift of salvation offered to us by Jesus Christ. The struggle on a daily basis as a Christian is to remind ourselves of this. The purpose of our life is to cooperate with God’s plan… But then things get weird. Rubio pivots from an evangelical assertion of salvation through Christ to a Kennedyesque call for the common good (which was itself derived from Luke 12:48: “For…
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…ation that played no role, the precedent of this collective response might better prepare us to understand how to mobilize action against the “wolf packs” lying in wait. We took the 9/11 attacks seriously because we believed them to be collective efforts, launched by organized and effective groups. What really stirred Americans into concerted collective action against al Qaeda was the conviction of how such a well-organized collective plot hid beh…
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