scholarly journals Marital Cakes and Conscientious Promises

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
G. P. Marcar

Abstract The U.S. Supreme Court has recently been tasked with determining—both metaphorically and literally—whether in matters of marriage equality and religious freedom, those within society can have their cake and eat it too. This came to the fore in Masterpiece Cakeshop (2018). In most of scholarship which has followed, the respective parties’ rights in this case are parsed in terms of rights to religious expression and free speech (on the one hand), and a statutory right to non-discrimination (on the other). By approaching this matter through a primarily philosophical (rather than legal) lens, I aim to present a new perspective. Where cases involve same-sex marriage, it is argued that both sides are predicated upon religious or conscientious convictions. This is established through a philosophical argument, which examines the nature of the marital promise to love and seeks to demonstrate how this promise entails a characteristically religious sort of belief.

Author(s):  
Michele Dillon

The secular principle of religious freedom is complicated by the postsecular recognition that religion has societal relevance beyond the religious sphere. This chapter focuses on the public activism of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) regarding religious freedom. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) contraception mandate, which the bishops rejected, provided the political and legal opportunity for the bishops’ campaign. The chapter shows, however, that its evolution can be traced pre-ACA to the growing momentum in favor of same-sex marriage. It discusses the thematic content of the bishops’ “Fortnight for Freedom” campaign, and the cultural salience of the claims advanced. It also highlights the limits in both the bishops’ construal of religion in civil society and secular expectations of it. Such limits, the chapter shows, are also evident in the polarized views of doctrinally conservative and liberal Catholics, and in the ambiguity in how Americans more generally evaluate pluralism and religious freedom.


2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Renata Grossi

AbstractLove is ever-present in the debate for the legal recognition of same-sex marriage. Its importance, however, is often underestimated. I will show in this article that much can be gained by viewing this issue through the analytical lens of romantic love. This analysis will show that romantic love is a contested idea. On the one hand it claims to embody a radical and permissive ideology that is capable of penetrating established social and cultural divides. On the other hand, however, love has been accused of replicating patriarchy, and of being ideologically heteronormative. As such, love is not necessarily the answer needed to win the legal argument for same-sex marriage – not unless we begin a process of redefining love for our times.They say that the world was built for twoOnly worth living if somebody is loving you1


2018 ◽  
pp. 13-38
Author(s):  
N. Ceramella

The article considers two versions of D. H. Lawrence’s essay The Theatre: the one which appeared in the English Review in September 1913 and the other one which Lawrence published in his first travel book Twilight in Italy (1916). The latter, considerably revised and expanded, contains a number of new observations and gives a more detailed account of Lawrence’s ideas.Lawrence brings to life the atmosphere inside and outside the theatre in Gargnano, presenting vividly the social structure of this small northern Italian town. He depicts the theatre as a multi-storey stage, combining the interpretation of the plays by Shakespeare, D’Annunzio and Ibsen with psychological portraits of the actors and a presentation of the spectators and their responses to the plays as distinct social groups.Lawrence’s views on the theatre are contextualised by his insights into cinema and its growing popularity.What makes this research original is the fact that it offers a new perspective, aiming to illustrate the social situation inside and outside the theatre whichLawrenceobserved. The author uses the material that has never been published or discussed before such as the handwritten lists of box-holders in Gargnano Theatre, which was offered to Lawrence and his wife Frieda by Mr. Pietro Comboni, and the photographs of the box-panels that decorated the theatre inLawrence’s time.


Author(s):  
Vered Noam

In attempting to characterize Second Temple legends of the Hasmoneans, the concluding chapter identifies several distinct genres: fragments from Aramaic chronicles, priestly temple legends, Pharisaic legends, and theodicean legends explaining the fall of the Hasmonean dynasty. The chapter then examines, by generation, how Josephus on the one hand, and the rabbis on the other, reworked these embedded stories. The Josephan treatment aimed to reduce the hostility of the early traditions toward the Hasmoneans by imposing a contrasting accusatory framework that blames the Pharisees and justifies the Hasmonean ruler. The rabbinic treatment of the last three generations exemplifies the processes of rabbinization and the creation of archetypal figures. With respect to the first generation, the deliberate erasure of Judas Maccabeus’s name from the tradition of Nicanor’s defeat indicates that they chose to celebrate the Hasmonean victory but concealed its protagonists, the Maccabees, simply because no way was found to bring them into the rabbinic camp.


Sexualities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 1021-1038 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrika Dahl

This article draws on popular culture, ethnographic materials and mainstream commercials to discuss contemporary understandings of the relationship between fertility, pregnancy and parenthood among lesbians and other queer persons with uteruses. It argues that, on the one hand, same-sex lesbian motherhood is increasingly celebrated as evidence of Swedish gender and sexual exceptionalism and, on the other, queers who wish to challenge heteronormative gender disavow both the relationship between fertility and femininity, and that of pregnancy and parenthood. The author argues that in studying queer family formation, we must move beyond addressing heteronormativity and begin studying how gender, sexuality, race and class get reproduced in queer kinship stories.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Judea Pearl

AbstractNon-manipulable factors, such as gender or race have posed conceptual and practical challenges to causal analysts. On the one hand these factors do have consequences, and on the other hand, they do not fit into the experimentalist conception of causation. This paper addresses this challenge in the context of public debates over the health cost of obesity, and offers a new perspective, based on the theory of Structural Causal Models (SCM).


2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 63-80
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Poks

Abstract Using the U.S.-Mexican border as the place of enunciation, Cantú’s autoethnobiographical novel insists on the materiality of the border, especially for those living on its southern side, while simultaneously deconstructing it as artificial - a line splitting families and assigning nationalities on an arbitrary basis. Being a collage of photographs from the time the writer was growing up in southern Texas and the cuentos inspired by these visuals, Cantú’s Canícula documents how border crossings and re-crossings become symptomatic of living in a liminal space and how they destabilize the concept of nationality as bi-national families must learn to live with ambiguity. On the one hand, there is the undeniable materiality of the border, with its pain, fear, deportations, and other discriminatory practices; on the other, there is a growing border community of resistance cultivating the memory that they are not immigrants, that they lived in Texas before the Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty. The paper examines the community’s strategies of survival in the contested cultural and social space and advances the thesis that, giving her community an awareness of its homogeneity and reclaiming its place within the larger socio-political context, Cantú becomes an agent of empowerment and change. She helps decolonize knowledge and being.


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