August 9
To the Heidelblog and Alejandra Molina for the portion of Molina's article quoted in a Heidelblog post about the conflict between a small private college in Washington State and the state's AG over hiring conditions that possible discriminates against those in the LGBT community.
Alejandra Molina's article can be found at:
https://julieroys.com/seattle-pacific-university-sues-washington-state-probe-lgbtq-exclusion/
What is interesting about what the Heidelblog did not quote from the article was the student reaction to the university and its leaders. Certainly not all, but some of the students, along with others, protested the school's code for employees because they believed that it was used to discriminate against the LGBT community.
The student reaction helps show that Clark's title for the article above really does not do justice to the story. The issue here is can a religious employer that offers mixed, meaning religious and non-religious, services to the general public set religious requirements for its employees. When we look at the story of the college in question in this way we easily see that it isn't the civil liberties of the university that is being called into question; it is about the civil rights of potential employees that is the issue.
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August 16
To Joseph Pearce and his article that praises Romanticism especially because of its reaction to the Enlightenment. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.
Why are we leapfrogging over the Enlightenment as if it had nothing to teach us? And with Romanticism's emphasis on individualism and feeling, why are some, not Pearce, blaming the Enlightenment for today's what some have called 'excessive individualism'?
Superstition and legitimate religion were very much intertwined before the Enlightenment. And even before the Enlightenment, reason and observation were important in discovering Heliocentrism, which was widely and adamantly denounced by Roman and Reformation Church leaders back then.
The problem here is that of reductionism. We have much to learn from the Enlightenment. But the Enlightenment doesn't have everything to teach us. The Enlightenmentt has provided some guidelines that have helped in protecting us against some erroneous religious teachings and statements of faith. The Enlightenment, however, has recently become a favorite scapegoat among some of today's authoritarian religious teachers because of how it challenged superstitions and religion. The Enlightenment has become a target because of how it has challenged the authority by some religious teachers. And that only shows that those teachers try too hard to denounce the Enlightenment are engaged in a turf war with it. We see that turf war today when some religious teachers try to denounce a great deal of what the social sciences are telling us about ourselves.
