Religion Dispatches
…probably conjure up images of a dark and smoggy sky when they think about air pollution, in fact indoor air pollution may be nearly as dangerous as outdoor pollution, particularly in developing countries where people routinely burn coal and biomass fuel for cooking and heating their homes. Indoor air pollution also provides the context for one of the most bizarre examples of a religious practice that has created environmental problems in the Unit…
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…rthodox activists and modeled after Fox News, offered to pay for a one-way ticket overseas for gay people who want to emigrate. The channel was funded by Konstantin Maofeev, a billionaire known as “God’s oligarch” who dreams of Vladimir Putin becoming a Tsar. More from the BBC: In a video on its social media channels this week, Tsargrad TV called on gay people to compete for a one-way plane ticket overseas. “Just recently, California—the most libe…
Read More…that discriminatory remarks on the basis of sexual orientation are against Air Force Policy. He should also have known, while Air Force members do have the right to speech and religion, that right does not mean airmen can say whatever they want, whenever they want.” Ouch. However, the military determined neither Monk nor his commander would be punished, which is kind given Monk’s very public, very willful attempt to tarnish their reputation. Perh…
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…quite successfully, worked to dismantle the secular liberal foundations of American law and jurisprudence in place since the New Deal. Ultimately, we need to ask how it’s been so easy for the Federalist Society to gull the nation for so long and with such ease. The answer probably lies in the “historical innocence” of Americans about which Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. With no feudal past to constrain us, with Protestantism…
Read More…nding achieving its own mission of preparing Academy cadets to be the very best United States Air Force ocers possible, these very same Air Force Academy cadets and staff will still be consigned to hell unless they accept former Lt. McClary’s own version of Christianity. Such statements are not only antithetical to the clear mission of the United States Air Force Academy, they are totally anathema to the purportedly globally inclusive purpose of…
Read More…him, saying, “We’ve gotten phone calls from military members who are undergoing discrimination…and with the exception of him, those folks that have called us have all wanted to remain anonymous. Sergeant Monk, to his credit, is willing to stand up.” Let’s read between the lines here: Monk is, quite literally, the best example of discrimination against Christians in the military that the Liberty Institute could find. He was chosen not so much bec…
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…uals, for instance, is not abortion, it’s male authority—a broader agenda. Bestselling books such as Wild at Heart and Every Man’s Battle go far beyond opposition to queer rights; rather, they’re assertions of a purified straight identity, a manhood purged of anything feminine. Consider the young purity crusaders I write about in chapter 13, “The Romance of American Fundamentalism.” They’re smart, hip, engaging kids; they scoff at the old Christia…
Read More…e, and led to a series of articles full of innuendo masquerading as fact. “Air Force Cracking Down on Christians,” a Fox News piece by the same author as the Fox article mentioned previously, shows that he’s more upset than ever about the Air Force’s investigation into Monk, an investigation that, ironically, his own poor reporting directly contributed to. As of September 10th, the original article stands without correction. With stories like thes…
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…but my money is on Jeff Sharlet’s The Family (Harper) as one of the year’s best and most important books about religion and politics. Sharlet’s in-depth investigation of an elite group working at the intersection of traditional Christianity and free market capitalism suggests that the religious right is just a sideshow. Few writers can pull off investigative journalism, historical research, and elegant storytelling. Sharlet does all this with a st…
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…ts of the Muslim diaspora through cheap communications technology and easy air travel. Islamist military tactics (Web sites as command centers, commercial airplanes as weapons) developed not simply from Hollywood movies, as was so often claimed following the 2001 attacks, but from the experience that constitutes the Muslim sacred community. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is therefore at least partly right in insisting that spiritual and not merely materia…
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