Religion Dispatches
In the midst of a global financial crisis one sector has yet to suffer the fate of the rest. Islamic finance, or Sharia-compliant banking, offers strict moral guidelines for dealing with money. Trading debt and risky speculation are off-limits, as is investment in immoral enterprises like gambling, prostitution, and war profiteering. It might be time to get the muftis on the phone.
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In which our columnist suggests that the Church adopt a scheme of numbering to refer to its various arguments against homosexuality. It would be more efficient, certainly, given that these arguments are continually invoked. But why the incessant repetition?
Read MoreThough it may be unhelpful to draw comparisons between the administration and fascist regimes, it’s important to recognize the “family resemblances” in their political reasoning and self-conception.
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Who is that tattooed, pierced kid with the pink hair and the “You Will Not Mock Our God” T-shirt? How confusion about evangelicalism has obscured the Catholic influences of pro-life youth.
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The president’s faith, according to John McCain, is “[the] number one issue.” Having scoured the public record, the author reports back with a startling proposal: John McCain may not believe in God.
Read MoreFor a good feminist “lesbian” must always trump “gay” in the alphabet soup of acceptance and tolerance.
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While both progressives and conservatives seek confirmation of their politics in the bible, how does one derive a political outlook from a text with few parallels to the political context in which we live? In other words, how do you ask “What would Jesus do?” when the one thing Jesus couldn’t do was vote?
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From traders rubbing the testicles of the New York Stock Exchange’s Golden Bull to the pantheon of saints, soothsayers and heretics who haunt it, the Free Market has earned its status as a cult.
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Unlike earlier technologies the ultra-personal iPhone will enable us all to become religious dilettantes privately dabbling with a few taps of the screen: the evangelical teen can recite the rosary, the Catholic can hear prayers in Hebrew, and a Jew can get a mantra. Were the Pontiff aware that the door swung both ways would he still go 2.0?
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Amid new rumors of man and dinosaur coexistence, the Texas Board of Education will be debating the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution and deciding whether to force religion into science class.
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