Religion Dispatches
…arrest. Segue to my second and primary point: Bonhoeffer’s discussion of cheap grace in The Cost of Discipleship was meant above all as a critique of the so-called “German Christians”—the Lutherans who readily went along with the Nazi program—as against the much smaller group of Lutherans who chose the path of resistance through their Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer recognized that the Lutheran emphasis on salvation by grace alone had always been…
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…hat’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?…This is not the way we should be doing it in America. As he spoke, I sat on my sofa with tears streaming down my face. When I was seven I did firmly believe that if I wanted to, I could be President of the United States. And I am certain that thousands of seven-year-old Muslim-American children across the country be…
Read More…, one particular antisemitic loon who’s been showing up at protests in the New York area for years now. None of them had the ‘human mic.’ None of them were in any kind of non-leadership leadership position. Surely, anyone who knows anything about the protests – which includes ECI’s leadership – knows this to be the case. Which makes ECI’s video a cheap lie — yet another in a long litany of desperate efforts by the far right to convert the largely…
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…ed States, it contributes to the “truth telling” element of a planned truth-and-reconciliation process on gender and sexual abuse in Episcopal spaces. And the truth is horrifying. Of the more than 2400 responses collected, 475 (20%) are from cisgender LGB Episcopalians. Nearly 40% of these—189 individuals—reported being the targets of inappropriate jokes and comments; 29.9%—82 individuals—of inappropriate touching; and a further 14.9%—71 individua…
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…orts,” is indeed “long-discredited.” But then they offer what amounts to an 800-word platform to the Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg. The short piece serves as a teaser for Friday’s episode of 20/20, the result of a year-long investigation into several ex-gay “camps” located in the American South. The 20/20 segment features interviews with at least two young people sent to the camps—as well as self-described pastors and administrators of th…
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…much including the “decent” white Christians, completely abandoned African-American aspirations for full equality within a few years of the bloody Civil War’s end. And why did these whites “move on” so quickly? Because there was so much money to be made in the first Gilded Age and because the reintegration and rehabilitation of the former Confederate states could contribute to that project. If you are one of today’s activist allies who thinks tha…
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…A Pennsylvania Lawmaker and the Resurgence of Christian Nationalism, The New Yorker, May 9, 2021 Stephanie McCrummen, An American Kingdom: A new and rapidly growing Christian movement is openly political, wants a nation under God’s authority, and is central to Donald Trump’s GOP, The Washington Post, July 11, 2021 Elle Hardy, The Right-Wing Christian Sect Plotting a Political Takeover: The New Apostolic Reformation doesn’t always admit its o…
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…I saw Long give a heavy-handed appeal for money during one of TBN’s “Praise-A-Thons” to an audience that clearly didn’t have the money to spare for lining the pockets of Christian television titans. Long was presented as a prophet; he learned the “spiritual authority” and “kingdom order” from the same teacher as Earl Paulk, and earlier in his career, T.D. Jakes. Here’s how Long applied the pressure: For Long, the telethon presents just another opp…
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…ight. We’re now almost a decade into an Orwellian state of perpetual war-at-a-distance. Yet Bousquet writes that we are still only in the “birth pangs” of the chaoplexic paradigm. God save us from what this baby looks like when it’s born; and from the belief systems that soldiers will need to entertain in order to enact it. The root of Bousquet’s credulity regarding the chaoplexic may come from taking too seriously Clausewitz’s axiom that war equa…
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…some moderate civil rights supporters. Author of numerous works on American-American religious history, including There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America and Martin Luther King: An Inconvenient Hero, Harding taught at Illiff School of Theology in Denver, Colo. for more than 20 years. Nelson Bunker Hunt A Texas billionaire remembered mostly for his business exploits, Nelson Bunker Hunt bankrolled the religious right. He underwro…
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