Religion Dispatches
…in states that won’t expand Medicaid coverage. It’s bad enough that, in a little-discussed provision of the ACA, hospitals that serve disproportionate numbers of the urban poor are losing their subsidies. But for Obama not to stand his ground and say that the cheap, low-level policies that many healthy people now have should be cancelled for the sake of the common good: that’s just inexcusable. On the other hand, he’s not getting a lot of help fr…
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…ry process of truth-telling and the material righting of wrongs. Rather, a cheap reconciliation was rendered, which served—at the beginning of Jim Crow, no less—to hide our continued animosities from ourselves, rejecting one of the major opportunities this nation has had to face what Eddie Glaude, following James Baldwin, calls “the lie.” It is now relatively well-known that most Confederate monuments were constructed at the height of lynching and…
Read More…han religious monopoly. In October 2016, TST’s Lucien Greaves travelled to Little Rock and attended a meeting of the Arkansas State Capitol Arts and Grounds Commission to discuss bringing Baphomet to the capitol. The commission treated the proposal seriously and actually discussed possible locations on capitol grounds where Baphomet might be installed. A public hearing for further discussion of the monument was scheduled for May 2017. But in Febru…
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…andstanded and read the proclamation they’d put out claiming that Governor Little’s handling of the coronavirus crisis was unconstitutional, particularly with respect to the spending of federal money and the issue of contact tracing. It’s a somewhat impressive feat to be right of center in the already quite red and theocratically-inclined Idaho GOP. After all, in March, the state passed two bills enshrining discrimination against transgender peopl…
Read More…ity threat posed by the neo-Nazis as “not very impressive.” Also coming to Little Rock is the conservative Catholic group “America Needs Fatima,” who will be holding a prayer vigil the day before the religious liberty rally. Greaves says of this group, “They protest us all the time but they’re not violent. They just tell us we’ll burn in hell. I don’t worry that anyone from America needs Fatima will start the violence rolling.” While this is nomin…
Read More…e group did not get a private meeting with Pope Francis, but was given VIP tickets to the pope’s weekly audience in St. Peter’s square. Religion News Service reports that several bishops, including “San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone – point man or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ battle against gay marriage – had written a letter to the Vatican on their behalf.” A group of LGBT Catholics from London who met up with the New Ways…
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…omething-year-old Deadhead guys hit on my teenage friends by offering them tickets to shows. Deadheads were anathema to my chosen subculture of socially conscious punks. East Bay punks were aggro and in your face about social justice, feminism, human rights; Deadheads, in our eyes, were too stoned and obsessed with their god Jerry to care. Sometimes, I’d be out in Berkeley at night, coming out of a punk show in some basement or garage, and I’d hea…
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…ly black, a stadium full of white people who paid more than a Benjamin for tickets is not going to be the nexus for authentic justice conversations. I work for a white, affluent, suburban, mega-church, so I’m used to that. But at that moment, before the music even started, I knew what my friend was referencing—I was about to get spiritual too. “They knew they were born to weep and keep the morticians employed as long as they pledge allegiance to t…
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…their psyches as inaccessible markers of meaning and status, than they are tickets to a Premier League match. A Spiritual War? This, at least, is the gist of much of the heated banter on the uprisings on the Facebook fan page of trip hop duo Massive Attack, where one fan drew something of a spiritual assessment from the film Fight Club: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the m…
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…nt, particularly because it is Dr. Tiller’s clinic. His loss was huge. Any little thing that brings a piece of him back is a big deal.” For their part, anti-abortion leaders in Wichita seem determined to deny the importance of the new clinic, despite the variety and intensity of their efforts so far. In an interview in his office at Operation Rescue headquarters, Troy Newman played it cool. “To me it’s just another first-trimester abortion clinic…
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