Religion Dispatches
…r worldly peers while simultaneously beholden to an arcane and restrictive code of behavior—is actually rather compelling. “Being tugged in one direction by the secular world and in another by the religious world, they have styled their own compromise,” he says, “[and yet] they also feel an unbearable sense of loneliness and despair.” But the extent to which Cohen understands his own motivations for journeying into Christendom is unclear. “I’m hop…
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…elivered—dissent and approval, femininity and righteousness and pleasure—encoded the proceedings with a special kind of attention, another layer to Supreme Court ritual. Those fabric beacons shone powerfully for those of us who have experienced marginalization, had to code switch from setting to setting, or learned to express ourselves through subtle cues beyond formal language. While it’s not a huge surprise that some of Ginsburg’s collars will r…
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…t the church from hoarding this wealth (though other provisions of the tax code do). Transparency would simply require the church to disclose the details of their cache. Sunlight does not burden religious liberty, it cures fraud and abuse. Asking for transparency from every nonprofit is perfectly legal, but Congress has not acted. In an era of congressional gridlock and where civil rights laws demanding equality are maligned as anti-religious libe…
Read More…about race; Edwards said that frequently progressives speak “in their own code,” which “sends people away” rather than “draw[ing] them in.” She added, “I want to make sure we’re using language to draw people in who share the same concerns about declining jobs and opportunity.” Edwards was reacting to someone in the audience bringing up the term “white privilege;” Edwards, who is African-American, cautioned that when people of color use that termi…
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…over Hurt, along with incumbent Democrats in 57 other races, according to today’s Washington Post. That’s because the NRA’s policy is to endorse the incumbent, regardless of party, all things ammunition-related being equal. In Perriello’s district, though, as in many others, few political observers would guess that gun rights are going to trump economic issues for voters, and it’s hard to say whether the NRA’s endorsement will mean much in the en…
Read More…s of the 67-member Congressional Constitution Caucus, whose mission “is to promote an American future that remains true to its revolutionary past.” On Monday they sent a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, requesting responses to “deep concerns” about a “dismissal agreement” in a lawsuit filed by the atheist group Freedom From Religion Foundation, which sought to compel the IRS to enforce its own regulations prohibiting electioneering from t…
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…orities.” Again, Dreher is firmly rooted in the conservative mainstream of today, as is The American Conservative. Citing right-wing authoritarian Orban and Italian neo-fascist Meloni as paragons for the future of conservatism, while reveling in the idea of using state power to suppress one’s political opponents is an open threat. But we need not read into Davidson’s words to deduce this, because he’s done us the favor of formulating his totalitar…
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…diverse. Maybe these explorers did see people whom a modern American would code as white. Maybe not. As Robinson demonstrates in The Lost White Tribe, the better questions here have to do with the interpretation of bodies, not just with the bodies themselves. Basically: why were European and American adventurers so eager to find these far-flung white tribes in the first place? And they were eager. Reports of white Indians and white Africans made h…
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…Liberal Western values may be on the declineelsewhere in Europe. But Malta today is proving that a country can adhere to key traditional values, promote its own religious heritage, and recognize the dignity of every citizen—all at the same time. Suriname: Country makes progress at home but votes against LGBT human rights at UN Human Rights Watch LGBT Program Advocacy Director Boris Dittrich writes: Suriname’s government is on the right track at ho…
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…ympathetic to the advertising. But we don’t take a position on this except promoting dialogue. At Sojourners, we’ve decided to have a safe place for dialogue and even disagreement on our staff and in our constituency. That’s interesting, since the Believe Out Loud ad could be best interpreted as . . . promoting dialogue. Sojourners, so far, has been silent on the Rev. Robert Chase’s piece we published here. In the court of public opinion Twitter,…
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