We're Talking About Practice; Not a Game, Not A Game, Not a Game

CNN has the story (HT: RNS).  The ban still must pass the French Senate before it becomes law. This is a complicated issue. On the one hand the burqa (full body covering) and the niqab (partial face covering) are religious and political . . . Continue reading →

The Intoxicating Power Of Moral Superiority

A while back some of us were discussing the problem of political correctness on university campuses, freedom of thought and speech, and speech codes. If universities were meant to be places of open enquiry, where theories may be proposed and debated, then . . . Continue reading →

Another Significant Threat To Constitutional Liberties (UPDATED)

In May of this year the Houston city council passed the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) that requires businesses and workplaces to make available restroom facilities not according to sex but according to gender identity. A group of Houston area pastors has . . . Continue reading →

Idaho Ministers Must Perform Homosexual Weddings Or Go To Jail. In America (UPDATED 10/23/14)

“For profit wedding chapels are in a position now where last week the ban would have prevented them from performing gay marriages, this week gay marriages are legal, pending an appeal to the 9th Circuit,” Warren Wilson with the Coeur d’Alene City . . . Continue reading →

It Was A Slippery Slope

…I was quick to smack down fears that churches would be forced to perform same sex marriages, or that people would be punished for not being made to agree. I deemed these wildly hypothetical fantasies. But I was wrong. …I apologize for . . . Continue reading →

The Real Danger Of Theocracy In America

Since evangelical re-engagement with social and cultural issues in the mid-1970s, symbolized by the 1976 election of a self-professed born-again, Southern Baptist (Democrat) from Georgia to the White House, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, against the background of the Moral . . . Continue reading →

The First Amendment Has A Past

Even so, the American constitutional commitments were hardly concocted ex nihilo. They reflected a recovery, adaptation, and consolidation, under the fresh circumstances of the New World, of themes that went back centuries— of the medieval theme of libertas ecclesiae (freedom of the . . . Continue reading →