Religion Dispatches
…rades to the site—an enhanced reading experience, better integration with social media, peace on earth. (We’ll be updating via our newsletter, here.) It’s our birthday, but it’s you who deserve the party (and the gluten-free, kosher, vegan, cruelty-free cake). Thank you for reading, for writing, and for your thoughtful and dynamic engagement with the ever-evolving question of religion in public life and culture. Yours, The Eds. …
Read More
…n were meant to eliminate the political clout and enfranchisement of newly freed blacks. Similarly, the Asian Exclusion Act was meant to undermine the economic growth of Japanese and Chinese Americans, as well as to scuttle the flow of immigrants from India and the Philippines who had been taking laborer jobs from poor whites. Indeed, over the past fifty years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, citizenship for people of color has been unde…
Read More
…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 assumptions in a far more generous a…
Read More
…s many historians oversimplify by identifying Calvinism as the Ursprung of free market capitalism, Keddie more precisely singles out Arminianism, the deviation from orthodox Calvinism that reserved some room for human effort in the work of salvation. He pinpoints the crucial contribution of Hugo Grotius, whom the Dutch government locked up for his Arminian heresy, in laying the legal groundwork for unrestricted pursuit of private gain and the expl…
Read More
…tner jumped from a 24 mile-high space capsule, becoming the first human in free fall to break the sound barrier. His jump broke previous records set by retired Air Force colonel Joe Kittinger, who provided guidance to Baumgartner during the mission. Like Kittinger before him, the daredevil faced an early crisis as he began to enter, but quickly recovered from, a dreaded tailspin. “At a certain R.P.M.,” he explained, “there’s only one way for blood…
Read More
…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…
Read More…ught. And so the challenge of this episode is both to “lodge” and to break free, to dare to think and act with courageous independence, but also to dare to commit and to belong. Gabriel Mckee__________ The Lodger Last year, I gave a three-part seminar on superheroes and religion at the Cornerstone Musical Festival. (I also did a video-blog of the music festival, which you can watch here.) My seminar was in the “Imaginarium” tent, where the festiva…
Read More
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
…ents but whose accountability to the larger church is nil. Hey, afternoons free for drinks and a little action, I bet there’s no trouble finding applicants for these jobs. Second, who pays for this kind of busy work? This nuncio is reported to have had a “stately residence and access to a beach house.” I suppose it gets a little lonely rattling around the mansion, and God knows what went on in the beach house. But mostly this is one of those Catho…
Read More…ouch says this: We at Christianity Today believe Christians are absolutely free to use marijuana (where legalized). And, when it comes to pot in our particular cultural context, we think it would be foolish to use that freedom. For the CT editors, the moral quality of marijuana use seems to depend entirely upon the “cultural context” in which it occurs. And since our particular context is not conducive to marijuana use, marijuana use would be “foo…
Read More