(Mosaic Intelligence Report: May 15, 2009) Pope Benedict XVI prays for peace in the Holy Land but his trip is mired with controversy. Why are Muslims and Jews upset with the Holy See? And what does the future hold for Palestinian Christians living in Jerusalem? Additional discussion at the Huffington Post.
Month: June 2009
Religion, Politics, and the 2008 Election
The Wolfson Center for National Affairs at The New School presents a conversation with Wilfred McClay, senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center at the University of Tennessee and co-author of Religion Returns to the Public Square, and Jacques Berlinerblau, with the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and author ofThe Secular Bible:…
Mormonism & American Politics: Noah Feldman
Keynote address by Noah Feldman at the Mormonism & American Politics conference entitled Persecution and the Art of Secrecy: An Interpretation of the Mormon Encounter with American Politics.
Economics: Lawrence W. Reed on the Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy
Lawrence W. Reed is president emeritus of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Midland-based research and educational institute on September 1, 2008. The Center’s mission is to equip Michigan citizens and other decision-makers to better evaluate Michigan public policy options and to do so from a “free market” perspective. For a PDF version…
Russian President may push ‘new world currency’…
EXCERPT FROM BLOOMBERG.COM Russian President Dmitry Medvedev may discuss his proposal to create a new world currency when he meets counterparts from Brazil, India and China this month, Natalya Timakova, a spokeswoman for the president, told reporters by phone today. Russia’s proposals for the Group of 20 meeting in London in April included studying a…
Reza Aslan: The Future of Religious Nationalism
At a time when religion and politics are increasingly sharing the same vocabulary and functioning in the same sphere, Aslan writes that we must strip this ideological conflict of its religious connotations and address the actual grievances that fuel the Jihadist movement.
1967 U.S. Supreme Court Decision sheds light on California marriage debate
There is presently much debate about gay marriage in California, and the roots for the argument come from several directions. In 1967 the United States Supreme Court addressed the issue of whether marriage was a fundamental right. Granted it had to do with people of the opposite sex, but the arguments for the State of Virginia which forbade interracial marriage were primarily religious in nature.
When you think about it, 1967 was not very long ago. If you are older than 42, if your parents were from sixteen states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Delaware, South Carolina, Georgia, or Florida, and were from different races their marriages would have been illegal. In California, interracial marriage was illegal until 1948.
Doug Kmiec on a Court Packed with Catholics (Wall Street Journal)
If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed by the United States Senate, she will be the 6th Catholic among the 9 United States Supreme Court justices. Doug Kmiec, my constitutional law professor in the area of the Bill of Rights at Pepperdine University, discusses what this will mean in a recent interview with Suzanne Sataline of…
Oregon House of Representatives passes Workplace Religious Freedom Act
SB 786 has passed both houses of the legislature and is now on the Governor’s Desk.