Religion Dispatches
…here.] [For more data from recent religious identification surveys, check out the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the American Religious Identification Survey published by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.]…
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…biggest megachurch in Uganda, the high-living pastor is quite frank that “American money helped us build this church,” adding, “whatever you see here is the fruit of American labor.” In another clip, a pastor marvels that aid from U.S. evangelicals increased threefold when they started attacking homosexuality. Churches’ financial success brings added clout to anti-gay pastors like Martin Ssempa—who drives his congregation into a frenzy by showing…
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…Abraham Lincoln. This is also, to be clear, a religious question. For many American Christians, particularly some American evangelicals and members of the Latter-day Saint movement, American history is as sacred and theologically charged as medieval and early modern Eastern Mediterranean and Eastern European history is for Orthodox Christians. If you believe in a God of History, you inevitably also believe your own history is divinely-mandated and…
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…hat never existed, a mythical Constantine at best. What they’re after is a new Mussolini; an American one. A Christofascist dictator with stars and stripes behind him, Bible in hand—a Caesar in the White House. The idea that all that’s needed for the US to recover from the throngs of secularism and equality (which the Right considers to be unnatural), is a benevolent dictator—benevolent, at least, to the supporters of the Right. And this idea is n…
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…United States. This is where my story begins. It was 1978 and my parents knew they had to leave Iran. They knew that the country was no longer a safe place for them. Unlike Iranians who tried to leave post-’79, our emigration was not dramatic. We applied for a green card and immediately left. We knew we had to leave as soon as we could, so we left everything behind: our home, our business, our land, clothing—everything. We arrived with nothing mo…
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…but certainly it all has the potential to be at least good. Humans create new humans all the time. It’s how we nurture those new creations that matters. Here is where to spend our energy. I suppose you could argue, and it certainly has been argued, that ‘in the beginning’ God created everything as it is now, in which case when new things are created in this burgeoning field of Venter’s known as synthetic biology, you might be a bit miffed. But fa…
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