Religion Dispatches
…f a coronation ceremony for Rev. Sun Myung Moon, owner of the conservative Washington Times newspaper and UPI wire service, who was given a bejeweled crown by Rep. Danny K. Davis, D-Ill. Afterward, Moon told his bipartisan audience of Washington power players he would save everyone on Earth as he had saved the souls of Hitler and Stalin—the murderous dictators had been born again through him, he said. In a vision, Moon said the reformed Hitler and…
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…not ours.” …Eric Gitari, a Kenyan LGBT rights advocate, on Sunday told the Washington Blade that Ruto has hosted a number of anti-LGBT American Evangelicals in the East African country. These include John Eastman of the National Organization for Marriage and Sharon Slater of Family Watch International. On Monday, anti-gay protestors at a march organized by the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya chanted that US President Barack Obama should not talk abo…
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…r of the KKK, is his history of abortion clinic protests. According to the Washington Post: In 1992, Aitcheson was arrested on charges of trespassing on the property of the West End Women’s Medical Group clinic in Reno. … Damon Stutes, the doctor who still runs the clinic, recalled the priest as a regular protestor, who “yelled at” people coming in and “acted like a caged lion that was just holding himself back.” That a priest was involved in conf…
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…ist tradition, it seems remarkably similar to our own controversy over the Washington Redskins. The tradition of Black Pete demonstrates that there is more to racism than asserting negative stereotypes or mistreating minorities. Race is also a mythological category. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss theorized that myth serves to take elements that oppose and contradict each other and to somehow “reconcile” them. When human beings create narra…
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…ntley regurgitated a fake quote beloved by Christian Nationalists: “George Washington once said, ‘It is impossible to govern the world without God and the Bible.’ And I couldn’t agree with our first president more; we need to hear the heart of God on issues we are facing today to govern correctly.” Of course, George Washington was famously reticent about religion, refused to take communion the few times he went to church, spurned religious consola…
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…, 2015, at the age of ninety, during the visit of the first Jesuit pope to Washington, D.C. In a perfect (ok, even a decent) world, Pope Francis would have announced John’s death the next morning. He would have hailed his brother Jesuit as the pioneer honest gay man that he was, lauded his massive pastoral contribution, and recommended his marvelous books for widespread study. He would have lifted John’s name in praise, paid his condolences to Joh…
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…. Palin—when, after signing a treaty with a mostly Muslim nation, repeated Washington’s comment almost verbatim. I suppose the popular speaker would have us establish one religion over all others—hers, of course—and subject our nation to the possibility of the kind of violent political wars that were averted here because of the wisdom of our founders. But, of course, she seems to consider guns more friend than weapon as she shouts, “Reload.” P…
Read More…media (both mainstream and alternative), Moon continues to move ahead on a number of fronts. His Washington Times continues to be the daily house-organ/must-read for conservatives; he has spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting right-wing organizations and causes; he controls the US sushi industry; he does business with North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il: and as Moon watchdog John Gorenfeld has reported, Moon officially considers himself Emperor o…
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…ckles of big government—or so say John and Carol Saeman in an op-ed in the Washington Post that must have mistakenly migrated from The Onion. The Saemans are Catholics who claim to “adhere to the Holy Father’s vision” of a preferential option for the poor. As part of their charitable activities, they donate to Charles and David Koch’s Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, also known as the Koch brothers’ “secret bank.” They are among some 200 larg…
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…st demographic challenge for Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions. As the Washington Post recently reported, a poll from the Public Religion Research Institute found that Catholic voters preferred Hillary Clinton to Trump by a crushing 23 percent margin, 55-32. With less than a third of Catholics intending to vote for him, Trump has fallen well below the support GOP candidates typically enjoy from Catholic voters. George W. Bush won the Catholic…
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