Religion Dispatches
…a’s parents (whose beliefs about physical healing were shaped in part by a Florida-based online ministry) chose to treat her with prayer in lieu of medical science. Dale and Leilani Neumann later told police that their daughter had not been examined by a physician in more than seven years. In late April, authorities charged the couple with second-degree reckless homicide, a felony punishable by up to 25 years in prison. But several observers have…
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…there were, by the 1830s, tens of thousands of them crowding churches from Florida’s swamplands to Illinois’s prairie? Tell me more, I thought. Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Culture Joshua Guthman UNC Press (September 28, 2015) What’s the most important take-home message for readers? That the Primitive Baptists’ story is an unlikely one, but a vital one, an American one. Beneath that message are three stories. The first one prow…
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…ten 80 years ago, Smith’s words run directly afoul of current laws such as Florida’s “stop WOKE act” and “divisive concepts” laws spreading across the nation. At its core, the essay targets Christian nationalism in the early 1940s and points out the threat it poses to democracy by linking it directly with fascism in Nazi Germany. Smith’s work grapples with conflicts of race and systemic inequality that are intertwined in American society. During J…
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…Shannon Lowney and Leanne Nichols, in 1994; Dr. John Britton in Pensacola, Florida in the same year; and Dr. David Gunn in 1993. The National Abortion Federation lists other physicians who have been shot and injured either at home or near their clinics between 1994 and 1997. These murders and shootings (as well as hundreds of incidences of fire bombings and violence at abortion clinics) took place in the aftermath of a long campaign by Operation R…
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…olor further calls into question the use of this abusive practice.” As the numbers have grown, so have the numbers of critics, Wired reports, citing a series of “scathing reports and documentaries” released in 2012 by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. That same year, the US Senate held its first-ever hearings on…
Read More…een a man and a woman. And California’s conservatives won’t be alone, with Florida set to vote on a Constitutional amendment in November and Republican candidate John McCain’s home state of Arizona considering the same. Twenty-seven states already have Constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriage. If heterosexual marriage were so sacred, we’d expect conservatives to be just as noisy about television shows like The Bachelor, or a host of…
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…dered a bit murky by our very familiarity with it. Indeed, in light of the number of posts I’ve seen this morning on how people are planning to preach on the parable, I feel compelled to point out that the “neighbor” Jesus describes doesn’t include the robbers, who strip and beat the stranger then leave him on the side of the road, the people who pass him by, or the legal expert (who, the gospel reading specifies, is “seeking to justify himself”)….
Read More…nors [was] the backbone of Cuba’s exiled elite.” A meeting with the former Florida governor, brother and son of presidents, and likely 2016 presidential hopeful? That’s donor power. Then, from 2010, there’s the widely disseminated report from Public Campaign described, quite directly by the Huffington Post as one that “raises the question of whether hard-line Cuban Americans will succeed in stifling further changes in U.S.-Cuba relations through t…
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…voters by saying, in as many ways as possible, “Yes, Virginia (or Iowa or Florida or Missouri) there are universal truths that can never change. You are not adrift in a sea of moral chaos. Elect me and you’re sure to have a fixed mooring to hold you and your community fast forever.” Though Republicans have had the most success with such language in recent decades, Democrats are eagerly trying to catch up. And they have a rich tradition to draw…
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…guns using Bible verses, other companies have a much closer affiliation. A Florida gunmaker, Spike’s Tactical, makes an AR-15-style rifle they call the “Crusader.” The name is chosen deliberately and with care, and the company knows exactly what they’re selling. As their website says: Spike’s Tactical created a balanced reliable rifle that would bring an excellent fighting rifle to people of all abilities and resources. The every man fighting rifl…
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