Religion Dispatches
…ize, because I think it is wrong to do so. Someone who is aiming for the highest office in the United States, as Santorum is, should be held to a high moral standard, as the strong historical and current socioeconomic ties between The Netherlands and the United States should be held in high standing. All this leads me to the following conclusion: a man who uses such blatant false claims in order to promote his own agenda is either very devious or…
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…t to America. It would be easy to make fun of the idea that God tucked the United States away for untold eons until the time was right to fill the Founding Fathers with the Holy Spirit to guide them through the process of writing our nation’s guiding documents. And surely many will make fun of it. It seems outlandish, to put it mildly. But in the words of the Mormon legal scholar Dallin H. Oaks, Perhaps the most important of the great fundamentals…
Read More…city, but the construct of a particular political entity, in this case the United States. Bias against illegal immigrants is a logical progression in the development of that national identity: nationalism is not simply a claim of ethnic similarity, but a claim that certain similarities should count as the definition of political community. For this reason, nationalism needs rigid boundaries in a way that pre-modern ethnicity does not: ‘Nationalism…
Read More…religion over another — not to mention the public diplomacy efforts of the United States that might wither from anti-Islam bashing, even supposedly uttered in the loving name of Jesus Christ — that might be perceived from Graham’s previous statements. When Klingenschmitt compares Graham’s appearance at the prayer event to Weinstein’s February appearance at an Air Force seminar, his accusation that Weinstein is anti-Christian is a red herring to di…
Read More…ndanger the lives of other Americans. This week, the 45th president of the United States pardoned Steven and Dwight Hammond. A statement issued on July 10th granted the Hammonds full clemency. There is no mention of Hammonds’ crimes—crimes that, were they committed by men of another race or religion, he would surely denounce as terrorism. Rather, the president calls the Hammonds’ sentences, which were handed down according to federal guidelines, “…
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…the directives of the president cannot be prosecuted under the laws of the United States. It’s difficult to believe, as Margolis does, that Yoo didn’t understand that his views did not represent the law of the land. He is too smart to have been in the dark about the fact that his conclusions reflected only his specifically minority view. Nevertheless, even if we assume that Yoo recommended what he did in the good-faith belief that the president’s…
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…o” is not cheap hyperbole, if you consider the history of Catholics in the United States. The US Catholic hospital system grew up in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; largely under the care of women’s religious orders, and largely to serve the poor. (Read about a few of the women who helped build Catholic health care.) The surrounding cultural landscape could be profoundly, hatefully anti-Catholic. Catholics found their rituals…
Read More…“to punish and prevent the practice of polygamy in the Territories of the United States”. – Bigamy punishable by a $500 fine and imprisonment not exceeding five years. – All acts passed by the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah “pertaining to polygamy and spiritual marriage” were annulled. What it did not do, however, was make the requirement of marriage being defined as one man and one woman as a condition for statehood for all states…
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…labor strike that stretched over five years. Chavez and Huerta’s fledgling United Farm Workers (UFW) was dwarfed by the Goliath of the California Grower’s lobby. Still, Chavez never lost faith and, yes he did indeed form a successful union. His movement was a Latino mirror image of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But while King was based in the black church, Chavez’s movement was adorned with the religious rites and symbols of Mex…
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…ichael Oren’s worst nightmare. Oren, the current Israeli Ambassador to the United States, is clearly very worried about American Jews losing faith or even interest in Israel. As an American himself, he knows that while support for Israel is extremely broad within the Jewish community, it is not necessarily that deep, and has to be reinforced continually to insure it is there when needed. And so, since his arrival as Ambassador, Oren has had a shar…
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