Religious war may have come to the streets of NYC

There was a massive fire in a beautiful old church in Manhattan's Flat Iron District yesterday. The Orthodox Cathedral of St. Sava was burned to the ground on Orthodox Easter Sunday along with two churches in Australia and Russia that were torched on the same day. It appears that it might have something to do with the continuing death spiral between Serbia and Croatia.

I went to a wedding at this Cathedral once. It was beautiful as old churches so often are. Ornate and quite different than a Catholic Church. The artwork was fascinating. I spent an hour just looking at the religious artifacts. It is a tremendous loss  to people of faith everywhere.

"Georgia Religious-Liberty Fight Reveals Christian Right’s Weakened Influence"

NRO:  For evangelical voters, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Not in Georgia, at least. 

When Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, first heard that Governor Nathan Deal had vetoed a controversial religious-liberty bill, his phone exploded with text messages. HB-757 was seen by many as a modest attempt to safeguard religious freedoms, stating, for example, that pastors could not be forced to perform same-sex weddings. Naturally, faith leaders across the state were furious, and Moore quickly became a sounding board.

“I’ve heard from the most apolitical pastors one can imagine who are shocked and disgusted. There’s a great deal of anger,” Moore says. “I don’t know that Nathan Deal will ever run for anything in Georgia again, but he would sure have a hard time if he did.” (read the whole thing)

Actress finds Senator Cruz a handful when she tried to hand him his lunch

Link to video

"Religious liberty should be a liberal value, too"

"The controversy around the concept of religious liberty — whether in the form of birth control mandates resulting from the Affordable Care Act, or nondiscrimination lawsuits related to same-sex marriage — can seem like a straightforward conflict between retrograde religion and the progressive state."

But in truth the battle over religious liberty is a conflict within liberalism itself. In one corner are the liberal values of pluralism and tolerance. In the other are the liberal projects of egalitarianism and administrative efficiency. The quick and decisive defeat of Arizona's attempt to clarify its state version of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) is evidence that our increasingly monocultural elite class is inclined to resolve these conflicts in favor of its egalitarian goals. But, it should tread carefully. Read more

Skipping down to the last three paragraphs.

There may yet be legislative compromises that satisfy the demands of both sets of values. Perhaps RFRA-style laws can be worded to assure egalitarians that religious objections are limited to certain events and actions, and not directed at entire classes of fellow citizens. And health-care mandates can be recrafted to use public institutions, rather than religious ones, as the guarantor of egalitarian goals.

But let me enter a suggestion as a conclusion. Liberalism should have the confidence to tolerate institutions, even large ones, that have competing and contrary missions to those of the state. The very liberality of the managerial state is guaranteed by real diversity, not just of skin color and sexual preference, but of religion and values, too.

Real pluralism preserves the possibility of critique emerging within a liberal state. The interplay of individuals and diverse institutions encourages liberality and understanding at the ground level of citizenship — the gratitude for people very different from you who are still very solicitous of your needs. Whereas the strict ideological hen-pecking of the state creates a kind of existential dread, and intensifies the panic of the culture war — the fear that a loss on principle in one case is the loss of all power and recourse in the future. Legislators and jurists would do best to retain these two essential liberal values, by finding solutions that deftly avoid setting them against each other.

The Week via Hot Air