Religion Dispatches
…Locke had led him to his Christian faith. Perhaps most importantly, Grove City college professors Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter sliced and diced their way through The Jefferson Lies, leaving little but pulp at the bottom of their scholarly veg-o-matic. Thomas Nelson, publisher of David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies and a substantial catalog of Christian works (some serious and respectable, some amusingly kitschy such as The Patriot’s Bibl…
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…e violence set up to protect our spaces. Land developers, civil engineers, city planners, real estate agencies, builders, insurance companies and a whole host of others all profit from our barrier-building and fear-mongering.” Racial antagonism structures our imaginations, as does our love of weapons. The former creates our enemies, and the latter constructs a false sense of independence and freedom. One of my neighbors was in a Target store recen…
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…r and wounded seven people before shooting himself in the head at a Carson City, Nevada restaurant in 2011; Seung-Hui Cho, a Christian, Korean American who killed 30 people and wounded 15 at Virginia Tech in 2007 before turning the gun on himself; Jiverly Wong, a Buddhist, Vietnamese American who killed 13 people (himself included) and wounded four in Binghamton, New York in 2009; John Allen Muhammad, the Islamic, African American “Beltway Sniper,…
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…nd that is Augustine’s discussion at the very beginning of his famous work City of God of the rape of Lucretia, a traditional Roman tale that he revisits in the context of real or anticipated wartime rapes of women of the Christian community. Lucretia was a Roman woman renowned for her extreme virtue, known to have killed herself after she was raped in an effort to restore her honor by making it clear that she in no way colluded with her rapist. T…
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…one (and women, too). Having been raised Mormon in the heart of Salt Lake City I recognize Mormonism’s tremendous organizational imprint on Mitt’s life; his experiences echo those of my parents and grandparents, cousins, neighbors, and even my own. An overwhelmingly lay Church, Mormonism is run by families. The laity fills all posts in the parish, performs most of the sacraments, and even takes turns giving the Sunday sermon (for good or ill), an…
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…locks away is a state-funded Christian crisis pregnancy center (one of the city’s nine state-funded CPCs), while across the parking lot anti-abortion Catholics pray downward upon the clinic from a third-floor chapel. The chapel is an outpost of St. Mary’s Cathedral, just five blocks away, whose bulletin announces that the church “goes to the abortuary every Wednesday.” In the fall of 2010 Tammi Kromenaker, the director of RRWC, noticed something c…
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…gogue’s, but also of the statesman’s trade. In my book The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics, I analyze some of the many ways that mendacity can be wielded for good as well as ill, depending on to whom the truth is owed, what the politician’s intention is in withholding the truth, and what the consequences of withholding it might be. Politics is a realm of human endeavor that values plurality, takes opinion seriously, and knows the force…
Read More…en and two lesbians to discriminatory laws in the country. “I serve in the city and I have seen many of them facing serious challenges because their sexual orientation does not conform to that of the general society,” said Odhiambo. “They are subjected to all sorts of violence, both physical and sexual.” Odhiambo, a married father of four, said increasingly gays are seeking acceptance in the society. It is not clear whether his job is at risk, but…
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Maybe this is unfair to Neville Goddard, a quirky, long-dead New York City mystic, but his 1939 book, At Your Command, reads like a pocket guide for fascists. “Can a man decree a thing and have it come to pass? Most decidedly he can!” is the book’s opening line. “The measurements of right and wrong belong to men alone. To life there is nothing right or wrong,” the mystic explains. And finally, “…every man’s conception of himself is going to be hi…
Read More…the founding of this nation.” Bachmann has used the John Winthrop “shining city on a hill” story before— something pioneered by Reagan and used by numerous Republicans in speeches to evangelical audiences. As Brian Kaylor writes in his book, Presidential Campaign Rhetoric in an Age of Confessional Politics, Reagan used it to emphasize “his belief that God had divinely created and blessed America and that America’s founders — as he did — trusted in…
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