Religion Dispatches
…derick J. Eikerenkoetter II (“Rev. Ike”), who in a candid moment admits to Walton, “it’s a wonder I didn’t kill anybody” with his notorious faith healings. Walton further situates his subjects’ rise in the growth of the Word of Faith movement and its further development by Oral Roberts, who was a mentor to the 1980s phenomenon Carlton Pearson (who “discovered” Jakes, as Shayne Lee chronicled in his first book). Roberts also mentored Word of Faith…
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…The book is alternately fascinating and frustrating. What we learn of Jeff Fort’s childhood doesn’t mention religious upbringing, though he had siblings named “Maryam, Kadija… Kaaba, Akaba, and Aki.” Similar gaps riddle the narrative. “An Illinois politician invited Fort to attend the 1969 inauguration of President Richard Nixon,” we’re told, but we’re not told who, or why. Likewise, we’re told “the El Rukns had been paid ten thousand dollars thro…
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…ing together existing chains in Costa Rica and Guatemala that had employed Walton graduates.” What amazes me is that even as we dreamed of a progressive, cosmopolitan, egalitarian, and cooperative counterculture, the Waltons of the world created one that now spans the globe. Equally striking is that their world looks to them the same way we would see ours: grassroots, anti-establishment, humane, and compassionate. Moreton’s scholarship and accessi…
Read More…ing web sites from exploding with incendiary speculation about a “Jihad at Fort Hood?” and a “Terrorist Incident in Texas.” The Huffington Post reported this morning that a Republican congressional candidate in Florida, Allen West, a retired mililtary officer, issued a statement on the massacre headlined “Terrorists Are Infiltrating the Military.” Muslim groups were quick to condemn the shootings — as if they were obligated to much a special effor…
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…to continue to shrink into the insularity and disorganization that caused the Philadelphia Archdiocese to decline so precipitously? It remains to be seen. Meanwhile, faithful Catholics and others who want to see the Pope may be losing heart. 10,000 tickets for the Pope’s Speech at Independence Mall sold out in two minutes on Tuesday, with 394k people trying their best to get a few. Tickets are already being scalped at $100 and up on craigslist. I…
Read More…y are no longer evangelical Christians because they had begun to feel uncomfortable with the judgmental nature of their faith. They felt it was keeping them from connecting with others. They started asking questions. “I can’t believe I was telling people on the beach that they were going to hell!” Jones said, laughing. “Remember that guy in Telluride we were trying to save?” Kumrits asked his friend. “Man, he sounded just like we sound today.” But…
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…na, started working at Wal-Mart in 2005. She told RD, “To me, Mr. and Mrs. Walton, they had their Christian beliefs and I truly believed they had done great things for associates.” The company had worked with single mothers on their scheduling, Sparks explained, and made sure that the workers had enough hours to pay their bills. But in the seven years since, she’s felt a change within the company—something she attributes to the 2007 death of Hele…
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…ke his middle. I have watched passengers with first class seats hand their tickets to uniformed veterans and sit in economy. Several times I have witnessed people move further back to allow a mother to sit next to her children. All of these required not only the hassle of moving, but also the discomfort of a worse seat. Sometimes the person with the better seat was asked, sometimes s/he offered. In most situations, the person moving to the worse s…
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…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…
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Adam Clayton Powell called it “cheap grace,” but we might call it “cheap atonement”: the effort by sinners to select which sins to acknowledge and repent. Pope Benedict XVI ended his heavily protested visit to England with a heartfelt apology for German bombings of England during the Battle of Britain; though he refused to accept Christian responsibility for the Holocaust, blaming it instead on pagans and atheists. Given that Cardinal Walter Kasp…
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