I never have known the joy of owning a small, pink, heart-shaped music box. In point of fact, I never will. I suppose, with two daughters in the home, that the purchase of such a box might be in the fatherly offing, but it won’t be for my own sake. Continue Reading »
When Chuck Colson, Robert George, and I drafted the Manhattan Declaration back in 2009, some people questioned why we had chosen to include religious freedom, along with the sanctity of life and the integrity of marriage, as one of the three most pressing moral issues of our time. Life is sacred, and matrimony is holy, they said, but isn’t religious freedom just another “political” tenet? What does it have to do with the Christian faith? Continue Reading »
State control of religion is a product of the Reformation, and the paradoxical product is privatization and a de-socialization of Christianity. Continue Reading »
It used to be the case that Americans referred unselfconsciously to their country as “a Christian nation.” The phrase had multiple meanings. A few speakers, no doubt, used it as a taunt: Non-Christians (which, for many, would have meant non-Protestants) should keep quiet or get out. Others used the phrase to indicate that Christianity, in a general way, informed American law and government. That’s what Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story meant, for example, when he wrote that Christianity was part of the common law. Still others used the phrase in a theological sense: America was the New Zion, Chosen of God. Continue Reading »
Post-argument predictions will continue to pour out regarding Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Sebelius, cases in which business owners (the Green and Hahn families) have voiced religious objections to being forced to pay for certain types of contraceptives. The . . . . Continue Reading »
Lumping together the recently attempted Arizona religious freedom law with new criminal laws against homosexuality in Nigeria and Uganda, the United Methodist Church’s Capitol Hill lobby lamented that “legislation that denies the human rights of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and . . . . Continue Reading »
I am no stranger to incendiary language. Organizations on the left and the right alike use loaded language: words designed, not to foster thoughtful discourse, but simply to whip the like-minded into a lather. Still, this was one of the more incendiary paragraphs that I had read in a while: In . . . . Continue Reading »
J Paul Grayson, a sociology professor at York University in Toronto, received a request from a male student asking to be excused from participating in a group assignment, in which the student would have been obliged to converse with female students. Grayson said no to the student but decided to use . . . . Continue Reading »
Rod Dreher is concerned about certain trends in law enforcement . He quotes Reul Marc Gerecht saying: For the FBI, religion remains a much too sensitive subject, much more so than the threatening ideologies of yesteryear. Imagine if Maj. Hasan had been an officer during the Cold War, regularly . . . . Continue Reading »
Happy Pulpit Freedom Sunday! I’ll be celebrating by going to Mass and then getting waffles, but if I were Protestant and living outside of New York I might be celebrating it by listening to a sermon about the ‘08 elections. The Alliance Defense Fund is sponsoring today’s event, in . . . . Continue Reading »
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