Religion Dispatches
…ing a population larger than the 25 smallest states combined… One in eight Americans is poor. One child in six is poor. … From 2000 to 2007, the number of children living in poverty increased by 15 percent… In 2007, the richest 20 percent of Americans had over 50 percent of the nation’s income, while the poorest 20 percent had only 3.4 percent.” In a piece titled “Fighting Poverty With Faith,” Steeland and Nordengren recently reported that “the ‘F…
Read More
…called out black churches as detached from the crisis. Despite the rising number of African Americans with AIDS, black congregations offered little comfort and even less outreach to the afflicted, according to press reports. Black churches were slow to respond, reporters noted, because most believed that homosexuality was a sin. Yet were black congregations any more homophobic than white churches with similar theology? If Jerry Falwell became the…
Read More
…Rick Warren signed a statement of concern about global warming, joining a number of the new breed of evangelicals, much to the chagrin of the old guard like James Dobson. The press began to talk about the expanded agenda of the “new evangelicals,” an agenda not limited to the old shibboleths of abortion and opposition to gay marriage. The Five Non-Negotiable Issues Despite all the above, on a number of issues critical to women’s lives, he remains…
Read More
…ortion. Both initiatives are strongly opposed by the Catholic Church and a number of news sites drew attention to the camera’s focus on the sour face of Santiago’s Archbishop Ricardo Ezzati when Bachelet mentioned them. Russia: French president pushes Putin on abuse of Chechen gays French President Emmanuel Macron urged Russia’s Vladimir Putin to ensure the safety of LGBT people in Chechnya, where gay men have been subjected to a campaign of deten…
Read More
…ditional readings of the Torah, it even goes back to God himself. Indeed a number of biblical books go beyond merely denouncing or delegitimizing Israel’s “right to exist.” At the time of the original covenant, God threatens that, if Israel disobeys His teaching, the people of Israel will “flee in defeat before your enemies; you may make a unified stand against them but you will run away in every direction; and you will become a horror to all the…
Read More
…sippi Clarion Ledger reported earlier this year that the overall growth in number of interracial couples in Mississippi was behind the national average (less than 2.4 percentage points in Mississippi compared to 2.8 percentage points nationally). According to a report released by Pew Research Center in 2017, only 9% of Americans say that interracial marriage is “a bad thing,” while 17% of respondents to a 2018 YouGov poll said that interracial mar…
Read More…ide epidemic of rising medical costs, disparate levels of care and growing numbers of uninsured or underinsured Americans,” the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy recently reported. “You’re describing the perfect storm,” Neil Calman, CEO of the Bronx, New York-based Institute for Family Health, a speaker at the event, responded to an audience member’s comment: “People are going to find the situation will get increasingly worse and go…
Read More
…istence of atoms or Adam? That last one may be a close call, but countless Americans do claim to feel a personal relationship with Jesus. How many claim to feel a personal relationship with evolution? For most Americans, God is more real and more important than evolution. Scientists fight religion at their peril. Religion addresses the great questions. Why are we here? Where did we come from? Why do we love, hate, or believe? To the extent that sc…
Read More…mproving press coverage of smaller, less well known groups. Second, if the American press cannot handle its responsibilities with regard to Catholicism (which is well known to many of them), how can we expect them to be helpful in reporting on Judaism, Islam, the Baha’i faith, Wicca, or any number of other groups that form the pluralistic religious mosaic in the United States today? No reporter or anchor could be expected to be an expert on the in…
Read More…nd waning of the religious right is a reflection of the cyclical nature of American politics. In the mid-twentieth century, the religion-politics relationship in the United States was purely assumed to be one of liberal faith-based advocacy. To varying degrees, mainline Protestants, African-American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews joined together in the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the fair housing movement, the nuclear f…
Read More