death penalty

In the rare instances when courts roll back Christian privilege, the cries of persecution are swift. But parity is not oppression. And the erosion of unwarranted privilege is not persecution; it is the steady march toward equality.

Last week on RD, Anthony Santoro presciently wrote: Since nearly half of six million residents identify as Catholic, however, a sizable number of potential jurors—those who follow the Church’s…

Forget the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should worry about “death-qualifying” the jury.

Following last week’s botched execution in Oklahoma, religious leaders began to weigh in on the moral quality of capital punishment. One of these, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president…

With Kennedy v. Louisiana the highest court in the land has given America a wonderful gift: it has reminded us that life is the highest value there is; the life of humans, of all the species, of nature.

Does your conscience, religious or secular, feel outrage? And does your heart cry? These, not dogma, creed, purity or piety, are the signs that your soul is awake.

It would be wrong to think that it is only Texas Governor Rick Perry’s boasting over his state’s punitive body count in a recent Republican debate that has put the death penalty back in the news (Texas led the nation with 167 executions from 1976-1998 and still leads with an incredible 234 since Perry became governor in 2000). Not at all. It is only our collective racial amnesia and apparent moral callousness where death is concerned that can make it seem this way.

A proposed measure in Uganda would make repeated homosexual activity punishable by death. Anti-gay activists in the United States may think that it goes too far, but they laid the groundwork for it.

An experiment in right-wing Christian social thought, Uganda is poised to pass anti-gay legislation. Will the US Senate leverage its weight in opposition?

A recent story in the New Yorker on the execution of an innocent man seldom mentions religion, though the elements are all there.