Religion Dispatches
The corrupt legislative shenanigans by lame-duck Republicans in Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina have prompted many to reiterate calls for “civility” and “love.” But are those objectively good things?
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These activists have made headlines—and, in many cases, served prison sentences.
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According to Bryant, the carve-outs in HB 1523 are no different than federal laws protecting pacifists from military conscription.
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I heard Rev. Daniel Berrigan speak about eleven years ago on a snowy Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn’s beautiful…
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Michael Long’s new book, Peaceful Neighbor, dares to place Mister Rogers in his social, historical, and political context.
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As NAACP President Ben Jealous told the Times last week, “it’s become clear that, just as Bayard Rustin admonished us all, that we would either stand together or die apart.”
“Who admonished us?” readers must have asked. Bayard Rustin’s role as advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and as organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech) should have assured his place in American social and political history. But Rustin has long been denied his proper place—largely because he was an openly gay man.
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He wrote to his mother, saying, more or less, Jesus was only a man and a man is on his own. It’s clear that there was a lot of anguish in that decision. If anything, untethering his conscience from religion put more pressure on him to prove himself and his sincerity. When Evan was manacled to the bars of his cell in Fort Leavenworth because of his absolute refusal to serve the army, his friend (and President Wilson’s son-in-law’s brother) John Nevin Sayre went to Wilson on his behalf and repeatedly described Evan to Wilson as Christ-like. Evan would have hated that description, but clearly part of him wanted that and needed that kind of commitment.
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On yearning for a world where taxes go to pay for education, for equal rights, and for leveling the playing field. Taxes for justice? How incredibly radical.
Read MoreDoes the Institute for Religion and Democracy oppose freedom of conscience for service members?
Read MoreWendy Gonaver’s lessons on the American Constitution may soon include her own story: the refusal to sign a loyalty oath designed to root out communists in public jobs whose effect is to weed out religious believers, particularly Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
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