Religion Dispatches
…that the Tea Party and her conservative faith stand for: the Constitution, free markets, loving the troops, and oh yes, “loving the smell of emissions.” While most families are scaling back their summer vacations, SarahPAC is paying for Palin’s homage to her version of the history of America. Her rapid-fire tours of historical sites is like the attention deficit syndrome version of American history. All photo ops and quick sound bites about energy…
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…n’t overturn any public health laws for other First Amendment rights, like free assembly and free speech. The religion of the justices also seems to play a decisive role in these decisions. According to the abstract of one study, for example: The Roberts Court has ruled in favor of religious organizations far more frequently than its predecessors—over 81% of the time, compared to about 50% for all previous eras since 1953. In most of these cases,…
Read More…ess conference what they thought of the stronger emphases of the Faith and Freedom conference—anti-same-sex marriage, anti-choice and family planning, anti-separation of church and state—Butler stated that Faith in Public Life supported the separation of church and state and Wallis would say only that Ryan’s budget wasn’t “pro-life.” Only afterwards did the Rev. Derrick Harkins of Nineteenth Street Baptist Church tell me he was opposed to the atta…
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…munism, where capitalism would be the empire of sin. Is there a link there between enjoyment and the way that queer theory imagines desire? I’m not sure of the relationship to queer theory. I try to distinguish between enjoyment as a straightforward concept and enjoyment as a legal term, meaning that you have the use of something without owning it. So obviously enjoyment and desire are not incompatible with possessiveness. From what I understand,…
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…merican spiritual traditions meant, at best, affirming a moral equivalency between enslaved and free persons, so as to disavow the notion that oppressed people’s spiritual traditions were superior in value to the religious faiths of human traffickers. Take Hebrew Israelism, for example, the primary spiritual tradition embraced by the authors of this article. When writers outside of our community add the unique problem of ortho-ethnicity (right peo…
Read More…opic: “We are Catholics. If someone wants to make another church, they are free to do so.” I think what he meant was, we men are the Catholics in charge and women who want to participate equally are free to form their own church. I can assure him on good authority that the process of forming new models of church is well underway with Catholic women serving the needs of the world. I can also brief him on the fact that some of the nuns with whom he…
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…onal ascension leading to galactic ascension; chakras; the universe; light codes; overcoming negative emotion; 100th monkey collective; the flower of life and sacred geometry; the divine is within; be your own guru; astrology; and so on. He advertises his now-defunct website starseedacademy.space, and promotes Life-Wave patches, a multi-level marketing scheme that he claims cured his father of cancer and liver disease. A starseed is a person who b…
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…are for the killer whale Shamu, These children had seen the popular movie “Free Willy” and were saddened and disturbed by Mister Rogers’s apparent unwillingness to free Shamu from the confines of the Sea World tank. The letters are very touching in the care they express for a killer whale in need of the freedom afforded by a vast ocean. They are also moving in the sense that they are the product of Rogers’s own creation—his handwork in encouraging…
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…ut the strategy works with a nonnegligible number of voters of color, too. Between 2016 and 2020, Trump made substantial gains among Latino voters in particular. In Kissimmee, the speakers, and especially the speakers of color, had a unified message about race, and it was one that Democratic strategists might wish to note as they craft their own messaging and outreach in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections. Speaker after speaker at the Road t…
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…tion do much belt tightening. Meanwhile, there’s absolutely no equivalence between criticizing people who hold (or enable) dehumanizing opinions—and even, perhaps, applying consequences for those opinions—and the suffering imposed on those who are dehumanized by those opinions (and whose rights may even be restricted by policies grounded in bigotry). Case in point: the transgender community took particular issue with the Harper’s letter, with tran…
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