a review of religion and media
An excerpt from the letter that Dr. Kenneth J. Howell sent to his University of Illinois “Introduction to Catholicism” students in preparation for a test, below. After a student anonymously complained that the letter constituted “hate speech,” Dr. Howell was removed from his position. Alliance Defense Fund has taken up a law suit against the university on behalf of Dr. Howell, claiming that he was fired for his religious beliefs. Continue Reading →
An excerpt from Austin Dacey’s review of Christopher Hitchens’ new memoir, Hitch-22:
The Christian West, after all, did not migrate towards secular government by mass conversion to atheism. The leading public arguments and examples came from Christian minorities—Anabaptists like Balthazar Hubmaier; Puritans like Roger Williams, John Milton, and John Locke. Even Spinoza’s case for secularism was premised on his reading of the Bible.
Despite calls from sponsors to disinvite Jim Wallis as keynote speaker at next week’s Lifest, an Evangelical music event in Wisconsin that attracts tens of thousands of young attendees, the organizers of the event have decided to keep him on. One sponsor, radio station Q90 FM, chose to end their support of the event after 12 years of continuous annual sponsorship. Said station general manager, Mike LeMay, about Wallis and his organization Sojourners: Continue Reading →
Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) — the legal activist organization founded in 1993 by “a band of TV preachers and right-wing radio ranters” which now constitutes the strong arm of what I call the Legal Right — is not taking the recent dismissal of a case they brought before the Idaho courts very well. The case sought to allow a charter school in that state to teach the Bible.
ADF is hopping mad and they’ve renewed an ongoing online spat with “gloating” Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AU). ADF Senior Legal Counsel, David Cortman, goes all out in his bashing of both separation of church and state and AU in a recent post. “Organizations like AU have twisted the words and meaning of the Constitution to fit their own ideological agenda,” Cortman writes.
Continue Reading →
Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) — the legal activist organization founded in 1993 by “a band of TV preachers and right-wing radio ranters” which now constitutes the strong arm of what I call the Legal Right — is not taking the recent dismissal of a case they brought before the Idaho courts very well. The case sought to allow a charter school in that state to teach the Bible.
ADF is hopping mad and they’ve renewed an ongoing online spat with “gloating” Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AU). ADF Senior Legal Counsel, David Cortman, goes all out in his bashing of both separation of church and state and AU in a recent post. “Organizations like AU have twisted the words and meaning of the Constitution to fit their own ideological agenda,” Cortman writes.
Continue Reading →
Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) — the legal activist organization founded in 1993 by “a band of TV preachers and right-wing radio ranters” which now constitutes the strong arm of what I call the Legal Right — is not taking the recent dismissal of a case they brought before the Idaho courts very well. The case sought to allow a charter school in that state to teach the Bible.
ADF is hopping mad and they’ve renewed an ongoing online spat with “gloating” Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AU). ADF Senior Legal Counsel, David Cortman, goes all out in his bashing of both separation of church and state and AU in a recent post. “Organizations like AU have twisted the words and meaning of the Constitution to fit their own ideological agenda,” Cortman writes.
Continue Reading →
No longer the patch of pounded earth in the middle of town, is the public square the shrinking footprint of legacy media? Is it the more than 200 million blogs that exist in cyberspace? Is it the school board meeting? Or the assembly at our local high school? Margaret Somerville, director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, doesn’t define the public square and yet argues that it is the primary contested space in the debate over separation of church and state. As Somerville rightly notes, varieties of faith (those unsavory to her — the “secular faiths” like environmentalism and scientism — she calls “isms”) are myriad and unrestrained (unrestrainable?), coloring all aspects of our lives whether we acknowledge them or not. So why so much concern that the isms are eradicating faith from the public square when she notes that all our messy voices are necessary for democracy to work? They’re not the right kinds of faith, apparently. Our laws are best informed by the non-isms, she argues. Which sounds a lot like an argument for privileging some faiths over others, in the public square, our courts, and elsewhere. Continue Reading →
Hunter Baker blogs at First Things that he is not entirely happy with the way his email interview with Sarah Harland-Logan of Harvard Political Review was excerpted in the final article, “Is Godless Good?” Baker is author of the 2009 book The End of Secularism (“The provocative assertion of the book is that secularism is of little value as a public philosophy and should be discarded as a failed experiment.”) and a professor at Houston Baptist University. So he’s decided to publish the entire interview himself. Continue Reading →
Yup. The same one that the Supreme Court just said in Salazar v. Buono was constitutional. (via Fox News and @JC_Christian) Continue Reading →
No, Fox didn’t pick up an Onion story. Yes, Wentworth, Georgia has a mayor named “Pig,” aka Glenn Jones. Yes, a company named Senior Citizens, Inc. does feed seniors at a rest home, on the federal dime. And yes, they’ve asked the staff to refrain from organizing a before-meal prayer because they fear it’s a violation of church and state. Pig’s not at all happy. Neither is former state senator and current gubernatorial candidate, Eric Johnson. He visited the home on Monday and said the blessing himself. Continue Reading →