Religion Dispatches
…r role in the development of transportation systems in the U.S. As with my project on Islamophobia, I want to understand the strategies that advocates are using to confront a race-based problem today in the so-called post-civil rights era….
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…of conservative white evangelical Christians, who voted for him in record numbers. To illustrate that, Meyers rightly turns to the president’s signing of a “religious liberty” executive order back in May. Although the order turned out to be “a whole lot of nothing” from a legal and policy standpoint, Trump and his supporters have heralded it as the first step toward reclaiming what they believe are this nation’s uniformly Judeo-Christian roots. A…
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…e hand many Trump supporters quickly—and frankly gleefully—blamed Muslims, using the incident to justify their xenophobia. Other, more well-meaning, observers urged patience until we had more information on the actual background of Ahmad Khan Rahami. Discovering his background is certainly important, but it misses the point. Unfortunately, this fixation on background—the person’s religion, race, or whether the person is an immigrant or citizen—is…
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…is a vital context for understanding morals and the history of sexuality. Using the material in the book was a good way of extending this treatment of these two themes backwards in time. I am also a great admirer of the British writer Marina Warner, who has written some great books about how modern society is underpinned by ancient myths and tales, and I wanted to examine in a similar way how the Sodom story has acted as an origin myth of homoero…
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…ce movements, one pushing conservative positions on bioethics and a second using religious arguments to deny climate change. The individual movements had received some attention, but no one had written about the big picture, what these movements have in common. That seemed like a perfect book project. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? I coined the term “paranoid science” to refer to pseudoscience movements driven by paranoia…
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…n, who has warned LGBT people against becoming “provocative,” and with any number of European populists who promise a return to a mythical “traditional” past. Gessen notes that a year ago she wrote that she believed Trump would target the LGBT community ”because its acceptance is the most clear and drastic social change in America of the last decade, so an antigay campaign would capture the desire to return to a time in which Trump’s constituency…
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…o reduce the state tax liability of Wichita-based Koch Industries to zero. Using Koch money, he crushed moderate opposition in the legislature. Never mind that he bankrupted the state in the process, to the point that the Republican legislature finally had enough and started pushing back against the carnage. Brownback also privatized the state’s Medicaid system and enacted the nation’s strictest work requirements for welfare recipients. Best frien…
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…t of scandal in my Christian life occurred when someone blithely described using chips and Pepsi for the eucharist. I still can’t give a completely coherent account of why that’s wrong, but it still seems pretty wrong to me. And it is an especially poignant question when we abstract from the hot-button topic of gluten to the more nebulous challenge of translating a practice across cultures. Where wheat (or wine) is unknown, choices have to be made…
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…urches. The latest White House resident carries on this grand tradition by using civil rights laws to further discrimination, the power of the education department to increase segregation in schools, the power of the interior department to accelerate the decimation of the environment, the power of the justice department to inflict injustice and the power of the EPA to further foul our nest. As Marianne Williamson says: “Evil is the power of God in…
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…themselves in ways that until recently were unknown in their tradition and using tones much closer to Evangelicals. They are defined as value voters as far as attracting electoral mass support is concerned. . . . This meeting over shared objectives happens around such themes as abortion, same-sex marriage, religious education in schools and other matters generally considered moral or tied to values. More than 15 years after the Catholic bishops he…
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