Religion Dispatches
…Plan” campaign. Alston said he hopes to organize 500 community screenings between now and the film’s official release in the fall. Robinson says he has found that nothing works better to change hearts and minds than LGBT people telling their own stories—or allies telling the story of someone they love, such as a child, aunt or uncle, or friend. He recalls making a too-flippant comment at some event asking how straight white men could “get it” in…
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…on in Anglican England, Penn established his colony as haven for religious freedom. While colonial authorities in Massachusetts either exiled or put to death those who deviated from Puritan orthodoxy, Pennsylvania became a refuge for Mennonites, Baptists, Quakers, Pietists, Jews, and Catholics. In the 1730s, St. Joseph’s Catholic Church was the only place in British North America where it was legal to hold a public mass. Despite the noble principl…
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…God’s plan for the country. Like their contemporaries, they, too, sought a better world but theirs—infused with rightwing religion—looked very different from the romantic utopianism of the pot smokers, the Marxist visions of the Weathermen or even the moderate Clintonism of those who worked within the system. Militant conservative evangelicals (or Christofascists) have been organizing below outsiders’ radar for more than four decades. Their effort…
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…a for a book that subverts the way we usually think about the relationship between faith and practice. What if, instead of starting in the clouds with a bunch of esoteric, lofty propositions about some God way up in heaven, we begin on the ground, in the trenches, amid the dirt and grime of our everyday earthly lives? What if, rather than saying, “God is A, B, and C” and trusting the trickle-down sanctification of free-market theism to make us goo…
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…the first to do worse than its parents’ misses. What we are supposed to do better is politics, not markets). The real question of the day, for Whitman, was what edifice should be built upon such a massive constitutional and economic platform; how that question would be answered marked the real test for the future of the American experiment in democratic pluralism. Here is Whitman again: The Third stage, rising out of the previous ones, to make…
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…concentrate on—wait for it—sex and marriage-related issues and “religious freedom,” which is also focused on the pelvic zone. And as if to prove how tone-deaf they are, on Sunday the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops kicked off its fourth annual “Fortnight for Freedom” religious liberty extravaganza, which runs through July 4. Surprisingly (for an event that marries an archaic English expression to a vague nod to American Independence and Catho…
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…nothing more than to separate sex from reproduction. Lysol advertisements used coded language to signify that, when used as a douche, the cleaning agent could prevent or even terminate a pregnancy. As historian Andrea Tone has shown in detail, Lysol was just one of a number of unregulated contraceptive products advertised in women’s magazines and in newspapers. Comstockery, in other words, endangered women by creating an environment where quacker…
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…y applied set of economic and political policies premised on the idea that free markets secure freedom and flourishing. Within this framework, nation-states ideally serve as subordinate enablers of capitalism as it forges a renewed multicultural village. This is the subtext for advertising campaigns that advance a not-so-subtle message that conspicuous consumption initiates subjects into an avant-garde multicultural global public. In a context in…
Read More…ree speech cases — for Christians, that is. In other words, whereas courts used to determine whether religious action (such as use of public school resources for a Bible club) would constitute government endorsement of religion, religious right legal advocacy has altered the jurisprudence to evaluate such questions based on whether the school’s exclusion of the Bible club constitutes “viewpoint discrimination” or otherwise infringes on the religio…
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…2014, and the White House in 2016. … Every time you read about how many House and Senate seats, how many statehouses, how many thousands of seats in state legislatures turned Republican since 2008, think about how many of them swung on the backlash against the Affordable Care Act. But like the 1890s Democrats, who couldn’t explain how repealing the Sherman Silver Act would help modernize the country’s currency system, “the Republican Party never…
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