Religion Dispatches
…eria was Egypt’s fate, or whether something worse is around the corner. In Today’s Zaman, I argued that Pakistan might be the more operative analogy. With weapons flowing in from Qaddafi’s looted cache, plus an army that according to Wikileaks is “no longer capable of combat,” it’s unclear how said military can secure the country, regain control of the Sinai—a thousand times harder after what happened yesterday—or hold its end of the bargain up wi…
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…ollege she joined an urban mission trip where she spent time with fellow African Americans and was “reintroduced to myself as a black person.” She began to see herself through God’s eyes “as someone made in the image of God whom God loves.” Lisa learned to embrace her identity as a black woman, but when she brought her newly empowered self back to her conservative white community, she was rejected. Eventually her vision of evangelicalism took a sh…
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…. White evangelicals own the disastrous Trump presidency. Until they admit this, admit it is a problem, and change, we must recognize them as a toxic illiberal force in American society and politics, one that needs to be politically sidelined if we are going to preserve American democracy….
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…a special guest, as will Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece and Director of African American Outreach for Priests for Life Alveda King. While Beck initially promoted the event as a non-political effort to return to the values of “the Founders,” he claims he only realized later that he scheduled it on the anniversary, and in the same location, of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. He suggested that while he did not realize the significance of the date, G…
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…2015) They are also misleading us, Wuthnow argues in his timely, obscenity-free new book, Inventing American Religion. Wuthnow, a sociologist of religion whose work has informed a generation of scholarship, examines how polling has shaped perceptions of religion in the United States over the past century. And he argues, convincingly, that pollsters and journalists need to be more honest about what these studies can, and cannot, tell us. It’s a sha…
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…ut with some very thick bankrolls? Mobilized Money: The Real Superpower in Today’s Power Politics During the Senate’s weary pre-Christmas vigil (running out the clock on last-ditch GOP efforts to block final passage) I heard Harry Reid drag out the old chestnut about politics being the “art of the possible”—and I smiled yet again that anyone would imagine the workings of Congress today conforming in any way to what was once taught in 9th grade civ…
Read More…issue with neo-Nazis, and how such a discussion got him banned from the American white supremacist site Stormfront and another “national socialist forum.” He goes on to maintain that because America has “nation-wrecking multiculturalist Jews,” rather than “conservative Jews” it has a “Jewish problem:” In any case; educate yourself and learn the difference. Today’s conservatives and want to-be Nazis are ignorant when they obsess so much over the Je…
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…n before. More than that, the nature of everyday life for most of us in America today is deadly for the world around us. The machines that facilitate our daily life exploit the fossil fuel spoils of the underworld, slowly turning the planet into a kind of living hell. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose knew that, even if many of us choose to ignore that it’s happening; phenomena like mass species extinctions are affecting us deeply. Rose argued that…
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…lected in After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History. In Embattled Ecumenism, American historian Jill K. Gill has recounted in rich detail the involvement of the National Council of Churches in the anti-Vietnam War movement. Sociologists Christian Smith and Patricia Snell, building on an argument by sociologist Jay Demerath, contend in Souls in Transition that liberal Protestantism contributed to its own decline…
Read More…nus the exemption, and Obama embraced the presence of religious leaders at today’s White House signing. Someone in the audience even shouted “amen!”, to which the president responded, “Amen. Amen. . . . Got the ‘amen’ corner here.” The Rev. Canon Susan Russell, Senior Associate Minister at All Saints Church in Pasadena, California, attended the White House signing today. Ball, said Russell, “got it wrong.” Ball cites the abandoned effort of Sojour…
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