While the "religious freedom" industry is busy protecting discriminatory bakeries and pharmacists who refuse to do their job, a humanitarian faces a hefty prison sentence for providing food and water to migrants in the desert.
While some have argued that opposition to a woman’s right to make decisions about her body is a legitimate religious freedom issue, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the religious freedom issue at stake in the abortion debate.
Many have argued that Trump is little more than a “scam artist” who has duped evangelicals into following him. But it’s the other way around: Trump didn’t use the religious right to win the presidency; the religious right used Trump to get what it wanted.
Advocates of school yoga and mindfulness are no doubt sincere when they speak of these practices as secular resources that are desperately needed by a troubled education system, but there are compelling reasons to be skeptical.
The 'trustees of the First Church of American Religion' express concern over the approach of Times columnist David Brooks: You place religious practice and affiliation in the category of palliative resources for those being crushed by the new ruthless economy, whereas the religion usually referred to as prophetic—a form of religion we still regard as indispensable—sees faith as much more than a kind of backstop for those who suffer.
In continuing to oppose women's ordination the pope argues that something has to be revealed in order for it to be done; but that we don’t do it so it must not have been revealed. A cursory examination of change on Catholic views of the death penalty and usury make quick mincemeat of that argument. Revelation provides direction toward increased justice; it's not a checklist of historical givens.
O’Reilly and Dugard’s interpretation of the gospels in Killing Jesus was motivated by the same politics of resentment that Trump inherited from the Tea Party—a politics of fiscal, ethnic/racial, and religious conservatism.
Concerned as we rightly are about the immediate human cost of Lori Gilbert Kaye’s awful murder and the trauma inflicted on the Poway and national Jewish communities, hardly anyone has delved into the theological causes behind Earnest’s actions, as confused as they may be.
The truth is that the ”forced-birth” mentality of those determined to eliminate abortion access is far closer to the Nazi philosophy of dehumanization and oppression.