As we remember this month the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., we would do well to understand that King and his philosophy of direct, nonviolent action — initially shaped throughout the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956 — arose from…
Arkansas allows medical providers to deny service based on a provider’s own ethics or religious beliefs
Personal conscience now outranks the responsibility to provide medical care to all people equally in Arkansas, according to a bill passed by the state Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Asa Hutchinson March 26. Senate Bill 289, also known…
‘Conscience … more or less’: Roger Williams, Mitt Romney and the rest of us
Mitt Romney’s act of conscience compelled the President, the Senate and the rest of us to confront faith and conscience, religious liberty and dissent, at this moment in our nation’s troubled, divided history.
Leaving a church: Sometimes it’s a matter of conscience
Leaving a church is a hard thing to do. We leave a community of relationships and end a shared history. It’s even harder when we leave over matters of conscience.
Teaching and learning dissent: the witness of the minority
Learning dissent is never easy. One person’s prophet is another’s anti-Christ. One person’s conscience is another’s bigotry. Sometimes dissent can get you damned. Sometimes (like now?) silence can too.
Consciences: distressed and dissenting
In Dissent in American Religion, the great historian Edwin Scott Gaustad wrote, “Should a society actually succeed … in suffocating all contrary opinion, then its own vital juices no longer flow and the shadow of death begins to fall across…