Religion Dispatches
…ng process that sorts out good options and bad even before decision makers use appropriate caution in choosing the path forward. The institutionalization of checks and balances, Rosenberg argues, is the essence of liberalism. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether Rosenberg is being fair to AZDem. What I want to say here is that neither of them are being particularly accurate in how they pick up on Niebuhr’s concept of humility. “Niebuhrian hum…
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…ief in me. That engagement changed my life. He demanded, in public, that I use my imagination and do the work that he said, in public, that he was sure I was capable of doing. He pushed me harder than anyone else has ever pushed me. Sometimes, he pushed me too far. In those moments, he was no longer asking me to use my imagination, but instead insisting that I give him something specific that he wanted from me. It took me a long time to be able to…
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…, we’ve come to expect routine deception from the President—as well as, to use the more technical term from Philosophy, “bullshit.” But what about dissembling from the White House spokesperson, a known evangelical Christian whose Southern Baptist preacher father Mike Huckabee advised her “to be honest” as the press secretary—or other Christians serving in the Trump Administration? Could a Christian lie? Obviously, Christians can lie—like other hum…
Read More…ng the line” (and fomenting outrage among base conservatives about Obama’s use of executive order—never mind the Bush administration’s use of the same) is meant to distract from the fact that the GOP does not have a viable, reasonable strategy for addressing the broken immigration system in a way that balances even the interests of its own stakeholders. Yes, immigration is one of those big-time challenges that requires an everyone-at-the-table s…
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…t of powerhouse programs like Florida State and Auburn. Some are there because they used drugs. One was charged with burglary. Another punched a woman in a bar. Football players spout self-serving platitudes all the time. “No relationship is perfect” is how Ray Rice explained the video of him striking his then-fiancee in an elevator in 2014. But Johnson isn’t trying to justify himself. He doesn’t use our shared imperfection to paint over his sins….
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…The Anti-Defamation League lists the valknot as a possible hate symbol because of its use by white supremacist Odinists, though the cultural permeation of these symbols beyond Odinist groups like Ásatru means that their presence isn’t necessarily an indication of ideology. The tattoo on his shoulder appears Greek inspired, while there seem to be runes on his hand, and bricks on his arms that could be an homage to the border wall. Turning to Q Sham…
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…n were being threatened by the possibility that people of any gender could use any bathroom. More than a decade later, not only is the T still frequently being dropped, but that will remain the case as long as we continue, from bathrooms to ID cards, to organize ourselves around the gender binary. Writing for Type Investigations, Sarah Posner argues that bills banning medical care to trans youth are rooted in what she calls “baseless distortions o…
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…during the Great Depression and transforming evangelicalism into a powerhouse for creative conservatism, or the recent work of David Chappell, Paul Harvey, and Barbara Diane Savage linking religious worldviews to changes in civil rights politics, our entire understanding of the era has been transformed in the last decade. We have Schultz to thank for including a more robust examination of interactions between and among Protestants, Catholics, and…
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…of Buddhist Jātaka narratives is not confined to any particular sect, because as models of exemplary religious ethics, these stories did not primarily address doctrine or dogmatic creeds. The narratives were theological “blank slates” and could be redacted to include dogma, but they didn’t contain too many “red flags” which identified them as coming from a competing doctrinal system. Thus the same stories are found in a wide range of Buddhist sch…
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…that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” [Note: In a puzzling move, the Trump campaign later tried to amend the statement to replace the phrase “entire existence” with “sad, miserable existence.”] In graduate school, I concentrated in political philosophy and ethics, w…
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