Religion Dispatches
…ce American by force.” When I described this at a luncheon table at this fancy-shmancy Islam and America conference in Qatar, a white guy at my table said, “That’s ridiculous. No one is American by force.” I said, “Well, now that is interesting. What about generations of slaves? There was no sign over the port when slave ships pulled in warning, “America, love it or leave it.” Surely we would have left then if we could.” The thing is, however hist…
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…ner. How long will we continue to limit and qualify our messages of acceptance, inclusion and embrace for the most vulnerable in order to maintain the comfort of those in our communities of faith who are well-served by the status quo? In the current climate, equivocating messages of affirmation are overpowered by the religious rhetoric of hatred. Silence only serves to support the toleration of bullying, violence, and exclusion. In the face of wha…
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…iconoclasm. When the new pope is soon shown within Time’s familiar red frame he will likely appear in full and flattering light, but only briefly. Is it any wonder that the last newsweekly standing would gravitate toward stories of once-unquestioned authority undermined and reduced to a shadow of its former significance? This is, after all, a story it knows quite well. *This essay was adapted from a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and…
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…al way forward for the Democrats is what he calls a “50-state/all constituencies” strategy that includes a strong Catholic outreach component. He notes that Hillary Clinton’s outreach to Catholics was notably less robust than Barack Obama’s. She didn’t recruit prominent Catholic backers the way that Obama did and skipped important Catholic outreach opportunities like a Saint Patrick’s Day event at Notre Dame when the campaign decided it didn’t nee…
Read More…lues—raised appreciation for its influence. The upshot? The perception of increased religious influence on American society is just a cataclysm away. Religion’s saliency for political machinations, cultural inspiration, and social movements is a separate reality from the growing number of nones. Both need coverage. But the Gallup data raises questions that I’ve rarely seen addressed in recent years. What does faith look and feel like in flyover co…
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…fore PTL could become a front-page scandal it had to have an outsized presence in American culture. That largely happened through innovation, including the Christian television talk show format, which Bakker pioneered with Pat Robertson at the Christian Broadcasting Network in the 1960s, PTL’s private satellite network, launched in 1978, a year before ESPN, and the theme park, Heritage USA. The Bakkers signature television show, the PTL Club, was…
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…hief among them contention over the pope’s claim to universal authority. A number of violent incidents over two hundred years, from both sides of Christianity’s two halves, helped solidify the separation. These included the Byzantine massacre of Catholics living in Constantinople in 1182, the sacking of Thessaloniki by Catholics in 1185, and their pillage of Constantinople in 1204. Finally, the establishment of Rome-allied episcopacies in traditio…
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…nt at the Kennedy Center. One of the speakers, Professor Patrick Lee of Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, insisted that we “owe to God thanks and reverence for his many blessings” and said “this is true not only of us as individuals but us as a community, us as a country.” This was just after Beck and Barton were hyping the important of individual salvation and individual Liberty. Because God has shed his grace on America, Lee said, “we…
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…ward than ever before. But perhaps more importantly, sexual abuse itself, once taboo, has become an increasingly talked about issue within the Orthodox world. Just a couple of months ago, two of the country’s largest and most influential Orthodox organizations, the Rabbinical Council of America and the Orthodox Union, co-sponsored America’s first National Jewish Child Abuse Prevention Week. There’s nothing to suggest that sexual abuse is any more…
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…jections to “blasphemous content.” The IHEU reports being contacted by an increasing number of secularist groups organizing on Facebook, including groups in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Sudan. In all of this, the United States is an anomaly since it rejects even laws against religious hate speech, which were found in 36 of 45 European states in 2011. It’s the best place…
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