Religion Dispatches
…igious exemption from examining informed consent materials. JULY In July, Adam Daniels––a Satanist from Oklahoma City who is not affiliated with the Satanic Temple––announced that he would hold a black mass in September in the city’s civic center. This was met with a surge of petitions and protests from outraged Christians. Among conservative Catholics, a narrative had formed of how Catholics bravely defeated the Satanists behind the Harvard black…
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…d skipped important Catholic outreach opportunities like a Saint Patrick’s Day event at Notre Dame when the campaign decided it didn’t need to focus on Catholics. Clinton paid the price in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania. “Hillary would have won Michigan if nine more Catholics per parish had switched votes,” Krueger noted, citing his own calculations on the impact of the Catholic vote in key swing states. In Wisconsin, it would have taken 18…
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…ged to leave the ministry teetering on the edge of bankruptcy when the scandal broke. But there was more to it than just big hair and money. Before PTL could become a front-page scandal it had to have an outsized presence in American culture. That largely happened through innovation, including the Christian television talk show format, which Bakker pioneered with Pat Robertson at the Christian Broadcasting Network in the 1960s, PTL’s private satel…
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…cause we lived outside of His laws. We will have to pay a price, but every day we don’t get behind Him, the price gets bigger. It gets harder. Get behind Him. He will be our shield because these people are not enemies of ours. They are enemies of Him. They are enemies of man’s freedom.” “Commanding us as a people.” Doesn’t that sound dangerously collective? Brent Walker, a longtime advocate for religious liberty, agrees that there’s a dichotomy. W…
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…and procession to find a few confused and pitifully human old men at microphones still trying to send out impressive puffs of smoke. Within 20-40 years, we will have women priests ordained with the blessing of canon law (not outside canon law as at present). This will happen sooner than previously expected because each act of abuse or cover-up weakens the power of the male hierarchy. Their convoluted reasons for why only men can represent Jesus C…
Read More…e heresy but we need to give God the room to move in people’s hearts, if that’s indeed what’s happening.” He concluded by saying that while he wants to wait and see if Beck’s professed faith in Jesus is “real,” he is “very encouraged by the movement all around the country to get back to the foundations of our country. God is using Glenn Beck.” It will be interesting to see if Beck’s influence can keep the anti-Mormon criticism at bay. Moreover, wh…
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…nical Council of America, says the influence of rabbinic opinion over everyday life—known as da’as torah—has increased considerably during the past few decades. “There is a growing authoritarianism in the Orthodox community today,” says Rabbi Dratch. “There is a hierarchy and a deference to rabbinic opinion and these two forces play off each other.” This means that the success of initiatives to hunt down abusers in the Orthodox community ultimatel…
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…n Facebook, including groups in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Sudan. In all of this, the United States is an anomaly since it rejects even laws against religious hate speech, which were found in 36 of 45 European states in 2011. It’s the best place in the world to be a secularist. Several years ago I co-authored an article in Free Inquiry magazine, entitled “Atheism is n…
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…e been filed by businesses like Annex challenge the ACA’s contraception mandate on a number of grounds. The most significant challenge invokes the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, claiming that the insurance coverage mandate imposes a substantial burden on the free exercise of religion. Annex Medical lost its claim because the court concluded that the mandate does not impose a substantial burden on religious exercise and in the widely-pu…
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…ling to rework the entire framework of their teachings, they can ‘Blackout Day’ till they’re blue in the face, but their overall message will remain loud and clear: Black people are a stain. A moment, only to be tolerated but never fully accepted. And the only square that will prove to matter will be the one at which we started: Square one, where the little Black girl in a Christian school is trying to figure out why her braids “don’t meet dress-c…
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