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  • Freedom Wings0

    Benjamin Franklin knew a lot about kites and electricity. And he wrote enough pithy sayings to forever confuse them in the mind of the Biblical speed reader with Solomon's opus. But he has come to occupy the comedian's end of the Audubon spectrum for his promotion of the Turkey for National Bird. I still remember

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  • Religious Rights for All0

    Sergeant Patrick Stewart, a 34-year-old decorated American soldier and follower of Wicca, was killed in Afghanistan on September 25, 2005, along with four other soldiers, when a rocket-propelled grenade struck his helicopter. For bravery in the line of fire, all five soldiers were posthumously awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Yet while the

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  • Tumults, Riots, and Seditions0

    The European wars of religion, which followed the Reformation and raged roughly from the early mid-sixteenth century to the later mid-seventeenth century, were marked by a range of atrocities, all carried out in the name of Christianity. Later generations realized the incongruity and attempted to shift the culpability for the violence to one side or

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  • The American Government vs. Religion?0

    A professor of religion at Texas Christian University, Ronald Flowers wrote in his book That Godless Court (Westminster/John Knox) how "In 1962 and 1963, as a reaction to its decision banning school-sponsored prayer in the public schools, the Supreme Court was frequently called 'godless.' Is that a fair representation of the High Court? Or is

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  • Avoiding Misguided Metaphors0

    Even when the U.S. Supreme Court reaches the right result in a matter involving church-state relations, the justices too often do so for the wrong reasons. Cutter v. Wilkinson is illustrative. Handed down in May of 2005, Cutter reversed a lower court that had struck down as unconstitutional the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons

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  • The Scripturally Informed Conscience0

    The road from the Protestant Reformation to the religious freedom of the American republic was full of unexpected turns, switchbacks, and delays. The ambiguities, tensions, and paradoxes within church/state thought are seen starkly at the second Diet of Speyer in 1529—the event which birthed the term "Protestant." The Diet, or gathering of German nobility, was

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