Inspiration Faith & Prayer Health & Wellness Entertainment Love & Family
Newsletters Special Offers

Religion and Public Life With Mark Silk

You figure that Q90-FM, a Christian radio station out of De Pere, Wis., has pretty much made Jim Wallis’ day by pulling its sponsorship from Lifest 2010, a Christian music and preaching festival starting in Oshkosh July 7. It seems that controversy has been percolating for some time over the festival’s invitation to the head…

It’s true enough, as Vatican lawyer Jeffrey Lena points out, that when the Supreme Court declines to hear a case, that cannot be taken as a pronouncement on the merits. Still, it’s interesting that the court lacked four votes to take up Doe v. Holy See, the Oregon lawsuit in which an anonymous plaintiff is…

Reporting on yesterday’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, the NYT’s Adam Liptak described the case as a clash between “religious freedom and antidiscrimination principles.” But actually it was a proxy war. Neither religious freedom nor antidiscrimination clashed as such. At issue was the refusal of California’s Hastings School of Law…

I grant you that it isn’t every day that the authorities hold a country’s bishops for questioning for nine hours, confiscate their computers and cell phones, and drill into the sarcophagi of a couple of their deceased number. But when Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone protests that the Belgian bishops had been held without…

On June 29, 1106, a Jewish intellectual named Moses Sephardi had himself baptized into the Catholic church in Huesca, Spain. Taking the name Peter Alfonsi, he went on to achieve fame throughout Christian Europe as an astronomer and author. In his Dialogues against the Jews, he presents his present self arguing against his former self…

Like the late Justice Potter Stewart when it came to pornography, I feel like I know religious free exercise when I see it, and I tend to see it in a lot of places. Wearing a yarmulke while in uniform? Sure. Eating peyote as a sacrament? Fine. Practicing polygamy the way they did in the…

Would Jewish conservatives embrace Mike Huckabee as the GOP presidential nominee in 2012? Zev Chafets–whose book, A Match Made in Heaven, deals with Jewish-Evangelical support for Israel–suggests as much in Ariel Levy’s profile of Huckabee in the current New Yorker: “There’s a lot of Jewish money on the right that’s got to go someplace, especially…

By an appropriate coincidence, today’s sentencing of Sholom Rubashkin, former head of the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant in Iowa, for fraud and money laundering, comes just a few days on the heels of the guilty plea of Eliahu Ben Haim, one of a group of rabbis caught up in a New Jersey money laundering conspiracy.…

As a Beliefnet newbie, I’d like to add my two cents to last week’s dust-up between my colleagues Rod Dreher and Nicole Neroulias over the issue of journalistic treatment of religious differences. To briefly recap, Nicole confessed to being a bit troubled by Steve Prothero’s new book, God is Not One: And Why Their Differences…

So what’s up with the Southern Baptist Convention deciding to take a, well, pro-regulatory stance on the oil disaster in the Gulf? Just a week ago, Richard Land, SBC public policy pooh-bah, was out there defending BP and blaming “the environmental movement.” That was a far cry from the SBC’s June 16 resolution calling on…
archives most recent
search this blog
More from Beliefnet and our partners