Religion Dispatches
As we close in on the November 4th general election, much attention has been paid to the possibility of a “Bradley Effect.” Named for former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley who lost his 1982 gubernatorial bid despite having a lead in the polls, today some still wonder if racial fears will trump public professions when voters step inside voting booths on Tuesday. Yet in California, several conservative groups are counting on what political scientist…
Read More…te, trapped by nature in their own country and at a safe distance from the United States. We’re obsessed and fascinated by them. They are different but still part of our shared human community. Our sense of “us” can safely expand to include them. But the “illegal” kids are migrants whose parents—Trump has described them as “rapists”—threaten U.S. national security and Americans’ personal safety and quality of life. According to Sessions, whereas t…
Read More
…into his story of the KJV’s “radical impact.” Bragg also assumes that the United States is a sort of second, younger Britain. Indeed, he concludes his encomium on the KJV by observing that it “is a book which has informed and enriched two English-speaking empires over 400 years and carried many of its messages around the globe.” Ten years after King James Bible was published, the Pilgrim Fathers set sail for America. They found and they founded a…
Read More
…ened by those who do and those who want a mystery to have control over the United States army and have access to nuclear weapons. Mysteries can be dangerous and days of Jubilee do not always end with eras of sublimity. In the United States, there have been alleged days of Jubilee before. On January 1, 1863, African Americans throughout the nation and many northern whites celebrated the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation. Nighttime vigils wer…
Read More
…ise in hate crimes and speech against Jews both internationally and in the United States, Weisman provides a powerful voice about what it means and feels like to have such hate directed towards you. Reflecting on a conversation with someone who had denied that antisemitism still exists in the United States, Weisman responds “I recoiled at her words and argued passionately that Jews must never think that anti-Semitism has been eradicated. Vigilance…
Read More
…lite churches spread throughout Eastern Europe, Argentina, Israel, and the United States. As the SPLC’s Casey Sanchez reported, the pastor “promote[s] his vision of global theocracy through elaborate, large-scale Christian rock operas that Ledyaev writes, directs, and stars in, and which are replete with lasers, smoke machines, and spandex-clad actors in ghoulish makeup. One of the rock operas, which young Russian-speaking, anti-gay activists prom…
Read More
…ans understand to mark the beginnings of US global power. In that war, the United States defeated one of the dominant earthly powers to date, taking, in the process, its first colonies, including Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. In other words, this was the first US war of intervention and charts the beginning of the nation’s colonization and rise to global power. Couple this with the late nineteenth-century theo-political belief in Manifes…
Read More
…ingered and was picked up by religious groups saying that in order for the United States to be a strong nation, it needs to have a moral core. And that moral core is best defined by evangelical Christian teachings. So, there you have this formula that allows White evangelicals to demonstrate their right to political power: If we don’t have political power, everything’s in trouble. So again, this is the White Christian nationalism that works, not j…
Read More
…atheism as the alternatives to fundamentalism. Neither does justice to the United States’ status as the world’s most influential nation. Instead, being progressive about religion should mean taking the logic of religious diversity to its ultimate conclusion and fostering the conditions to create multi-religious individuals. What’s involved? The United States is currently a multi-religious nation, and a nation that individuals of a variety of relig…
Read More
…M. Hutchens of the Christian Zionist “Jerusalem Connection,” who has been promoting the piece. Why? Bartholomew: “I can see why Freund would enthuse over this, but it’s less clear why a conservative evangelical like Hutchens would want to promote the idea of 500,000 to 1 million Portuguese and Spaniards embracing a religion other than Christianity. Such are the mysteries of Christian Zionism.” Coral Ridge Ministries Produces Is Jesus God?: Since…
Read More