…er mark the arrival of the jazz idiom—and with it the bluesy sinews of the American soul—to the hallowed halls of Western art music, smothered under a featureless musical goo and carried off to further mutilations I will not relate here. Mr. Smisek, I am not a religious person. If I can be said to adhere to any confession, it is that primordial, preliterate one that has sprung forth everywhere ever since we beings were human: the covenant of sound…
…notions of “human dignity” and “human flourishing,” Catholic natural law—an 800-year-old tradition dating back to Thomas Aquinas—is a lens that offers utter clarity to conservative Catholic jurists, activists, policymakers, and scholars as they observe, describe, and engage the world. The power and sharpness of this lens allow them to confidently snap every human movement—every human desire and motive and act—into its divinely appointed and proper…
…a of the wealthy 1%. Smiley and West are seeking to appeal both to the down-and-out inner-city person of color who struggles to find a job and to white folks in rural Kentucky who shout about the evils of government spending at Tea Party rallies while riding around in their motorized wheelchairs purchased with Medicare money. Readers who may not want to read about black and white in America may be interested in reading about green. The Rich and th…
…e men” who suffered in his fight for Germany’s salvation. Adam continued in 1941: “Christ’s teaching was entirely anti-Jewish in its tenor (that is why he was crucified).” Redefining Jesus as an Aryan began during the nineteenth century and intensified in the decades before and during the Third Reich. Jesus, theologians argued, was born in Galilee, an area populated, they claimed, by racial non-Jews, including Aryans from Iran; his message was wel…
…redistribution of wealth are not in the gospel. It’s simply not true. Luke 1:52-53 describes Jesus’ mother, Mary, anticipating his birth with these words: “He [God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” This same Jesus tells us in Matthew 19:24 that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich…
…GAFCON (Global Anglican Future Conference) met in Nairobi, Kenya from April 18-21. They made plans to training bishops and prepared for GAFCON 2018, which will be the 10th anniversary of the conservative Anglican manifesto, the Jerusalem Declaration, and the third GAFCON conference. According to a GAFCON communique: We are excited to announce that the new chairman of the Primates’ Council is the Most Rev. Nicholas Okoh, Primate of the Anglican Chu…
…liberal view of America, one which the right portrays as being just as anti-American as the supposed pervasive radical Islamism in our midst. During the uproar over Park51, Newt Gingrich, who last week launched a presidential exploratory committee, gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute warning of “this comprehensive political, economic, and religious movement that seeks to impose shari’ah—Islamic law—upon all aspects of global society…
By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston
…Family politicians, some of whom were likely involved in the joint American-West German effort to arm up the Somali dictator Siad Barre, a self-described “Koranic Marxist” who agreed to pray to the American Jesus in return for weapons with which he promised to fight communism (is this a matter of ends, or means?): “It is a fabulous group of men,” wrote Colson. “In fact, I’ve never met any group quite like it. I think we should arrange to use them…
…about whether such an arrangement would satisfy his clients, but he was non-committal. (Religious non-profits have also brought RFRA claims against the accommodation.) The argument wasn’t over, though, without a kosher butcher analogy. This one was raised by Justice Samuel Alito, who pointed to a Danish effort that would close kosher and halal slaugherhouses through a law that would ban killing an animal without stunning it first. Verrilli describ…
…ail to bolster political or economic demands (the sort of utilitarian “rent-a-collar” approach that is common in movement circles today), but rather political and economic demands that are made on the basis of a moral foundation. It will take wrenching change to transform today’s labor movement. It requires us to think about the labor movement as a moral force in society, not just an economic actor. One of the key lessons from Sea-Tac is that the…
