Columns
The real culprit in Christian Legal Society
By Mark Silk — July 8, 2010
“Religion freedom rolled back by SCOTUS” proclaims yesterday’s post by Rod Dreher on the Supreme Court’s decision in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. Taking off from a post by Wendy Kaminer over at the Atlantic, Dreher claims the court “believes that it’s licit to protect other groups, while singling traditional Christians out for special discrimination.” […]
No evangelical pandering for Mitt
By Mark Silk — July 7, 2010
Or so the new strategy goes. Not good enough.
The Beliefnet beat
By Mark Silk — July 7, 2010
Regular readers of this blog will know that a month ago I started up another blog over at Beliefnet, the religious multiplex where millions of subscribers can do one or another spiritual thing online. Likewise, those who follow religion-and-media news will know that Beliefnet, founded by Steve Waldman back at the end of the last […]
The NYT’s non-hatchet job on the Pope
By Mark Silk — July 6, 2010
Notwithstanding Michael Sean Winters at NCR, R.R. Reno at First Thoughts, Rod Dreher at Beliefnet, and Mollie Ziegler Hemingway at GetReligion, the big takeout by Laurie Goodstein and David M. Halbfinger in last Friday’s NYT is no hatchet job. It is, by my lights, a piece of balanced, well contextualized reporting that added some essential […]
Kagan’s Religion Clause Answers
By Mark Silk — July 1, 2010
Elena Kagan was asked a few questions about the religion clauses yesterday, and the Baptist Joint Committee has a transcript. On my non-lawyer’s reading, her answers are lawyerly, professorial, and determinedly unrevealing about where she herself might come down as a Supreme Court justice. She indicated that in resolving the tension between the Free Exercise […]
Employees of the Vatican
By Mark Silk — June 30, 2010
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 […]
Kagan trumps the Barak card
By Mark Silk — June 29, 2010
So Sen. Grassley plays Robert Bork’s “how can you admire that activist Israeli Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak” card: “I am troubled by the fact that you hold up Barak as a judicial role model,” Grassley said. “He’s been described as creating a degree of judicial power undreamed of by most U.S. justices.” Grassley quoted […]
No Religious Freedom to Discriminate?
By Mark Silk — June 29, 2010
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 […]
Americans getting more religious!
By Mark Silk — June 28, 2010
Well, maybe a little bit. Gallup shows an increase in self-reported “at least once a week” or “almost every week” church attendance over the past two-and-a-half years–from 42.1 percent in 2008 to 42.8 percent in 2009 to 43.1 in the first half of 2010. Meanwhile, the Labor Department’s annual American Time Use Survey (ATUS) shows […]
The Apostate Temptation
By Mark Silk — June 25, 2010
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 […]
For the Mormon political scoop…
By Mark Silk — June 24, 2010
…the go-to source is Joanna Brooks, over at Religion Dispatches. In the latest of her posts, Brooks explains why Mike Lee’s victory in Utah’s GOP Senate primary Tuesday was not the clear-cut Tea Party triumph that some–i.e. WaPo’s David Weigel–imagine it to be. In Utah, Mormon roots run very deep, and you can’t tell the […]
Huckabee and the Jews
By Mark Silk — June 23, 2010
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 […]
