The True Believer
- March/April 2007
- March 1, 2007
A presenter at a conference on religious liberty recently told a story about a woman from east central Texas he met on an airplane. The woman was complaining loudly about the Supreme Court decision prohibiting prayer over the public address systems at Texas public high school football games. He explained to her that he had
READ MOREWhen convicted terrorist bomber Richard Reid attempted to explode a shoe-bomb on American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami, the first reaction was Why?—for he did not fit the stereotype. Only as investigators followed the trail from Reid's birthplace in Bromley, England, to the plane over the Atlantic did answers slowly emerge. One of
READ MOREIt has taken centuries for a true recognition of the fact that religious freedom is a fundamental freedom and a basic human right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written and adopted by acclamation by the United Nations in 1948, after the tragedy of World War II. Article 18 gives one of the best
READ MOREThe other day I listened spellbound to an interview with Alvin Toeffler, author of the seminal book "Future Shock." It does seem that we are living through many of his prognostications. The societal shifts and dislocations of the modern age explain in large measure the current religious agitation—whether it is Islamic radicalism in the Middle
READ MOREOn September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI provided what could easily be described as the most important speech of the twenty-first century. To an audience gathered at Regensburg University in Germany, Benedict with startling precision stated not only that "violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul," but also
READ MORERome has long cultivated an image as a gathering point for religious power. And of course that power at times has been biased toward a single viewpoint. Not so the "Fourth Interparliamentary Conference on Human Rights and Religious Freedom," organized by the Washington, D.C. based Institute on Religion and Public Policy and its president Joseph
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