by I was recently invited to join the ReligiousLeftLaw blog, and with their kind permission, I’m going to be cross-posting some of my thoughts both here and there. Here’s the substance of my first effort: Let’s define the religious left, very roughly and tentatively, as tending toward some sort of religious universalism, comfort with freedom of [...]
Read the full postTag Archive for 'pluralism'
In 1657, Peter Stuyvesant, the Governor of New Netherland (now New York), who had no patience for religious diversity, got wind of the presence of Quakers in the settlement at Flushing. He ordered the town officials in Flushing to hand over the Quakers for arrest. The officials refused. They wrote Stuyvesant a letter, the Flushing [...]
Read the full postFurther thoughts on the alleged parallel between opposition to the planned Islamic center (Park51) near Ground Zero and opposition about ten years ago to the building of a convent and the erection of crosses next to the Auschwitz death camps: I wrote in my first post that the relevant question in neither case should be [...]
Read the full postWhen opposition began to get stirred up to the planned Islamic cultural center near (not at!) Ground Zero, I thought the objections were intolerant, and even silly. Then I was stopped short by the comparison, made by the ADL and others, between opposition to the center and Jewish opposition about ten years ago — opposition [...]
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by Secularists who desire the bundle of rights, liberty, and equality associated with the secular liberal state have a serious intellectual problem, namely, what is the source of these rights, liberty, and equality? With only a very thin conception of the person and the person’s place in community, the secularist struggles for thick answers to these pressing questions.
Theists, and particularly Christians, in the United States have two different problems. First, we have a proposed source of rights, liberty, and equality based on our thick understanding of the human person and her place in community, but our reasons are rooted in faith or a faith based philosophy that is not accessible to all. In short, in our diverse and pluralistic society, we suffer from seemingly non-universally accessible reasons for acting this way rather than that. Second, we have a reputation, deserved or not, of being intolerant of those who seek to lead lives that diverge from traditional Christian teaching and practice.
