Religion Dispatches
…map, a staple of humanitarians that shows the true vastness of the global south. The burden on these men feels just as vast. Mercifully, though, their way of life doesn’t allow for a whole lot of time for agonizing. As Trappist monks—the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, officially—they gather in the church several times a day to chant prayers, from before dawn until after dusk. In between, they’re busy with “spiritual reading” and o…
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….” Thus spake Jim DeMint, the ultra-conservative Republican senator from South Carolina, in a recent radio interview with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. No, I don’t listen to Tony Perkins. I found the quote thanks to Think Progress blogger Scott Keyes, who offered what he calls this “outlandish statement” as an example of conservatives’ tendency “to dress their political ideology in religious language.” Maybe so. Politicians typica…
Read More…g happen in the Middle East prophetically? You are seeing the King of the South come together with lightning speed. Egypt has an army of one million men armed with 1500 Abram Tanks which are America’s best. We sold them to Egypt along with hundreds of our latest and greatest fighter jets because Egypt was controlled by Mubarak who was America’s friend. Can you imagine what Israel faces with Iran, Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Russia coming after the…
Read More…n a decade Kohler was shipping the work to new non-union facilities in the South. Just last year the current magnate—yet another Herbert Kohler—pushed through a greatly weakened contract for the small number of Local 833 members still employed in Wisconsin. I say all this to make the point that American business and its “business-friendly” sock puppets like Gov. Scott Walker will stop at nothing—nothing—to roll back worker rights and worker securi…
Read More…If the Iowa Renewal Project — if not the ones in later primary states like South Carolina and Florida — helped Huckabee win the caucuses there, having other presidential hopefuls will certainly dilute the meetings’ apparent endorsement of one candidate over another. One thing is certain though: there won’t be any dilution of the “Judeo-Christian heritage” themes by any of the candidates who want to get the Iowa advantage, even supposedly culture w…
Read More…businesses also is reminiscent of those who defended Jim Crow laws in the South. Those business owners, too, thought they had a right to serve whomever they pleased and bar whomever they hated. But, if you’re a business open to the public—no matter how private your ownership—you must be open to the entire public. This is the basis of “equal treatment” and the government has a right to enforce that. So, Rev. Davis and his cohorts want the governme…
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…expressive traditions—the work songs, field hollers, ring shout, and other Africanisms—that were encoded into slavery and the religious practices of slaves in the Americas from the very beginning. Much of what is considered stylistically distinctive about black gospel today derives at some level from its links to the history of oppression and overcoming that has long defined the African American experience. There is a certain world-historical grav…
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…can Catholicism, ever produced. Father Matthew was neither famous nor self-promoting, which is what makes the lyrical strains of the notes he did produce so very eloquent and so very worth our hearing. Both men seem to me now the product of a different age and a different time, and more to the point, both men were the result of a different way of inhabiting time—a monastic, a poetic, and ultimately a rather silent way. Both men came of age in post…
Read More…on to such clubs is based in religion—as was the fight over a GSA in Irmo, South Carolina. The principal of Irmo High School, Eddie Walker, eventually resigned over the club, later saying he opposed it because he views “the world from a biblical perspective and my view of that was that it was wrong.” Gays and lesbians are not alone in their battle for high school clubs. Next up: atheists. The Secular Student Alliance, which promotes atheism and hu…
Read More…ded on many Muslims for its economic success. On the one hand, many of the African slaves that worked to produce the raw materials of early American industry were Muslims. On the other hand, during the trade of goods between India and New England, some of America’s trading partners were South Asian Muslims. These two economic factors helped keep the young country afloat in the first decades of the nineteenth century. (Check Kambiz GhaneaBassiri’s…
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