Religion Dispatches
…tarted becoming a shtick.” In an early October interview with Christianity Today, Warren said that he hadn’t worn a Hawaiian shirt “in two years” and that he “doesn’t even own one.” Warren also said that he was tired of being labeled the new Billy Graham: “I’m very tired of it. I have said many times, there is no successor to Billy Graham… If there is any successor to Billy Graham, it’s Franklin, who has continued to do evangelism. Most media only…
Read More…l I wrote a longer commentary here on Tom Geoghegan’s apt observation that today’s bankers aren’t like the bankers of old who actually wanted to see loans repaid. Peter Goodman’s report today confirms yet again that we are in a bold new era of usury that no amount of windowdressing can fully conceal. The business pages this week have been filled with silly stories on tiny signs of life in the housing market, whereas the big story—the millions of d…
Read More…eligious traditions. There are bloody, vindictive religious traditions (as today’s not-so-new atheists insist on reminding us), and there are those which soften the human tendency toward vengeance and violence. Religion does not have the answer, because it has all the answers, the right and the wrong. Religion is less a glossary of terms (justice means this, righteousness that) than a grammar, a framework for moral reasoning. It is a language in w…
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…he Handmaid’s Tale is portrayed as more extreme than what we see around us today. Atwood was a scholar of the Puritans, and there are echoes of Puritanism in the visuals (those outfits, public punishments, forced prayer), and in the plot devices. And yet again: there are constitutional issues at hand in our present-day reality. Sure, freedom of religion is increasingly being used as a weapon by conservatives, but who’s really threatened by that? M…
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…ch on Washington, has endorsed the use of her uncle’s name, insisting that today he would be called a “social conservative.” In fact, King strongly supported Planned Parenthood and was awarded the Margaret Sanger Award in 1966. King’s thoughts on war, peace, justice, community, civil rights, and religion sound quite unlike those who quote him today but opposed him then (or would have if they were alive). The struggle continues to keep King’s drive…
Read More…e people who really struggle. “I’m thinking of the people in nursing homes today, who don’t know if they’re going be able to pay for the cost of being there. … I think of the people who may be losing their houses. I can’t even imagine the fear and the concern that’s out there today, because these big powerful politicians wanted to spend our money with no limit.” I think what’s most frustrating about this comment is, not only did Dobson… vote for t…
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…w Deal. In the pages of Christianity Today (the fundamentalist namesake of today’s popular evangelical magazine), Machen likened explaining the Constitution to President Roosevelt to explaining color to a blind man. But his concerns went beyond the President. When the Supreme Court upheld New Deal assistance to debtors in 1934 in Home Building & Loan Ass’n v. Blaisdell, Machen was despondent. “Chief Justice Hughes and his four associates have decl…
Read More…to a veritable boom in the quarrying industry were that still the practice today). The same for homosexuals. And the biblical conditions for divorce are so strict that a woman could be beaten within an inch of her life and still not be allowed to legally separate. The point is that nobody in the mainstream Christian church today would argue any of these propositions. A hundred years ago, that was not necessarily the case. In other words, the defin…
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…the forces of light must now preserve civilization itself. In the face of today’s problems—“financial crisis, decline of our values, the deterioration of the family, rampant greed and materialism… terror and war”—the only way to overcome our “hopelessness” and “fear” is to “return to the values and principles that define us. The Jewish Jesus I have laid out before you embodies these Judeo-Christian values.” In Boteach’s Rohrschach test, the Jews,…
Read More…at the end of World War 2. And India provides a cautionary tale for Israel today. The terrifying moral they provide is that “two-state solutions” do not work, if we imagine working as the creation of stable borders and relatively peaceable neighbors. When it was clear in 1946-7 that the British would leave the Indian subcontinent, then the great post-colonial question emerged: how many countries should be created out of what were previously vast c…
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