Religion Dispatches
…released, tailed, and finally ambushed and murdered by klansmen. You can read the whole terrible history here. In 1988, Molpus was approached about speaking at an event at the now-rebuilt church, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the murders of the three civil rights workers. According to this account, Molpus was advised not to go. It would be politically unwise and personally risky—and besides, he was a young and popular politician with a pr…
Read MoreMy name is CPT Justin M. Lienhard. I served as the platoon leader for both the 10th Mountain Division, 1/87IN, A CO, 1st Platoon, and for the 75th Ranger Regiment, 3D Battalion, B Co, 3D Platoon. I took part in three combat deployments: the first in Hawijah, Iraq; the second in Baghdad, Iraq; and the third predominantly in the Arghandab Valley and Panjaway District of southern Afghanistan. I believe in our constitution and in the strict separatio…
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…lives are also under attack. clergy and their church communities are spearheading much of this work. The practicalities of protecting black houses of worship, however, are very much of this world. Many may not remember that during the years of 1995-1998, 670 churches burned, according to the Community Relations Service, and in 1996, the Church Arson Prevention Act was signed by then-President Clinton. In light of the shooting at Emanuel AME and th…
Read More…Christian: I’m a Christian. We go to the Presbyterian Church. My wife’s a Deacon there and we’ve gone there ever since we came to town. I see that Christianity and values is the basis of our society. . . . 98% of us won’t murder people, won’t steal, won’t break the law and it helps a society to have that religious underpinning. You still need to have the laws but I think it helps to have a people who believe in law and order and who have a moral c…
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…tes’ Rights” used by Goldwater and Reagan, to the image of the South as a peaceful society led by genteel patriarchs, romanticizing the brutality of slavery and plantation life. From 2007-2011 Haley was the Governor for South Carolina, the first state to have seceded from the Union, so it’s not terribly surprising that she has a history of defending at least parts of the Confederacy. In 2010 she claimed that the state had a right to secede in a ta…
Read More…wer: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom. The book jacket for the Trump book reads: From Phyllis Schlafly, the woman whose celebrated classic A Choice Not An Echo (over 3 million copies sold) upended the 1964 Republican Convention, comes a persuasive new argument for a surprising conservative choice: Donald Trump. For the first time since 1980, a significant number of Republicans are considering abandoning their party’s nominee. This is a grave mista…
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…s will Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece and Director of African American Outreach for Priests for Life Alveda King. While Beck initially promoted the event as a non-political effort to return to the values of “the Founders,” he claims he only realized later that he scheduled it on the anniversary, and in the same location, of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. He suggested that while he did not realize the significance of the date, God might have had a…
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…idering Reagan: Racism, Republicans and the Road to Trump Daniel S. Lucks Beacon Press August 4, 2020 Scholars have long pointed to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 appearance at the Neshoba County Fair, an annual event where Mississippi politicians regularly gathered to spout off racist diatribes that took place in Philadelphia, the town where Klansmen had murdered three civil rights workers in the bloody summer of 1964, as evidence of the racist undertones…
Read More…e” that “constitutes a precious support in the life of the partners,” the leaders of the Catholic Church have more or less caught up to where the culture was in about 1997, when Ellen DeGeneres became the first openly gay character in a TV show and the news of her coming out was big enough to warrant the cover of Time magazine. The following year, “Will & Grace” debuted and mainstream America began its rapid evolution in its acceptance of both hom…
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…Roman Catholic theology and knew that the church made no exception to its teaching that Catholics could never use artificial methods of contraception. The only acceptable form of birth control for Catholics, both then and now, is natural family planning, which relies on calculating a women’s infertile period during her menstrual cycle and only having sex on those days. The “rhythm method,” as natural family planning was called in the early 1960s,…
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