Religion Dispatches
…much darker set of “grievances,” and the uptick of hate crimes and racist harassment committed during his campaign is no accident. Will the angry voters from Trumpland reach out, empathetically, to the majority of voters who were repelled by their candidate? So far, with Trump tweeting complaints about protests focused on the rhetorical violence embodied by his campaign, I’m seeing little hope that calls for “unity” are much more than capitulation…
Read MoreAfter watching from the sidelines as various Salafi groups lashed out at Telecom mogul Naguib Sawiris over his controversial tweet, the Muslim Brotherhood’s new Freedom and Justice Party has capitalized on the uproar as well. Mohamed Morsy, the leader of the Freedom and Justice Party, lashed out at Sawiris during a recent public meeting in Mansoura, a large city in the Nile Delta region. Morsy spoke mostly in general terms allegedly accusing Sawi…
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I spend a lot of time outside the levees of coastal Louisiana—my wife and kids would say I spend too much time out there. It is a slow-motion, shape-shifting deltaic masterpiece where water and land have clashed for millennia to form wetlands, marshes, ridges, barrier islands, and bayous able to adapt to the creative and destructive hand of God. Also for centuries, people of Native American, European, and African descent have lived on land and wi…
Read MoreThis week’s earthquake along the East Coast damaged the National Cathedral in Washington DC. Church attendance is dropping faster among those who don’t have college degrees. Meanwhile, Duke sociologist Mark Chaves finds that Americans are losing faith in their religious leaders. When it comes to baptisms, some are dunkers and some are drunkers. A Sacramento priest showed up to an infant baptism too inebriated to sprinkle the kids. The priest has…
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…The Cubit’s series on blame in contemporary society, RD associate editor Sarah Morice-Brubaker explores how some conservative Christians channel their anxieties about social change and urban environments through imaginary, fake-transgender bathroom predators. For more on blame, read the introductory post or explore the full series. “The desert was a ‘counter-world,’ a place where an alternative ‘city’ could grow,” writes historian Peter Brown in…
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…collaborator) declared theirs his favorite of the “so-whore-ities.” SNL’s Dana Carvey as “The Church Lady” in the late ’80s. It really was special. Cars drove by honking their horns, peeling out, and blasting that most famous of Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion duets. Cindy knew the song, and without missing a beat decried the collegiate obsession with WAPs (though Cindy, clutching no pearls, did not use the acronym). It was a carnival, a freak sh…
Read MoreThe failed attempt by a would-be Nigerian terrorist to bring down a Delta aircraft over Detroit on Christmas Day must surely rank as the loudest non-explosion whose reverberations have quite literally been heard around the world. International travel over the next week was an adventure, to put it mildly. In Athens, everyone traveling to the United States was patted down and all carry-on items were unpacked and closely examined, without exception;…
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…ion. FDR, Ramsey continued, had listened to John Maynard Keynes instead of Adam Smith, or God, and from that point forward Americans started down a path from self-reliance to a dependence on government, and the tyranny that comes with that: “The problem is, we shifted to saying that government, not God, is our provider,” he said. (In fact, influenced far more by his own persistent fiscal conservatism than by Keynes’ economic theories, FDR ordered…
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…” These days, Evans is vigorously urging his supporters to traipse over to Amazon.com to buy his latest book Jimmy Carter: The Liberal Left and World Chaos: A Carter/Obama Plan That Will Not Work (Time Worthy Books). The book mocks and belittles former President Carter’s efforts working for peace in the Middle East. Although the book resided at #4713 in “Books” in early March, a couple of recent appearances on the Fox News Channel provided a book-…
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Toward the end of my stay in Nigeria as a correspondent for The Economist in 2007 and 2008, I asked my driver, an older Muslim man named Bello who was perhaps my most trusted friend there, who he blamed for Nigeria’s corruption woes. “Our religious leaders,” he told me. “If they told our politicians to stop, they would.” There are no two ways about it: religion and politics in Nigeria do mix. The country’s troubles are visible and pronounced—pove…
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