Religion Dispatches
…Muslims, even if the rhetoric doesn’t rise to that of a Falwell or a Graham. This, at a time when solidarity beyond specific differences is needed most. Contra the NAE, it pays to cast a wider net when seeking to understand evangelicalism—and, I would add, all religions. It especially pays to do so right now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtXmryT32oc…
Read More…that is connected to Islam and that is proud to be Muslim? Now enter World Net Daily — the chief outlet for birtherite conspiracy theories which has relentlessly pushed the absurdity that President Obama is not a U.S. citizen and is a Muslim — and its ever-unreliable Middle East correspondent Aaron Klein, the “reporter” behind the debunked claim that Hamas supported Obama. He takes aim at Nobel Laureate and pro-democracy dissident Mohamed ElBarade…
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…, as Americans, we have little notion of what life without a social safety net actually looks like—at least until we head into the developing world. Similarly, fringe religious movements thrive, in part, because they stay on the fringe. It’s easier to live out your utopia when you don’t also have to maintain the infrastructure of a nation state, too. If we were all members of the Followers of Christ Church, for example, the country probably wouldn…
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…mptied coffers after Vietnam, the disastrous slashing of the social safety net in the 1980s, the protracted legitimation crisis in American democracy, and the failure attend to the still crippling forces of racism, inequality, and political apathy are the big stories in this America, LaHaye’s fact-fictional writing constituted a kind of archive deflecting attention from these issues, instead giving his readers and sympathizers an escape route. It…
Read More…the responsibility of the family and the church and any government safety net is labelled “socialism.” It is the model in which education is the sole responsibility of families, leading to the goal of eliminating public education and any state regulation of private education and home schooling. At the very heart of this version of Calvinism is the goal of bringing all areas of life “under the Lordship of Christ.” So yes, Catholic, Calvinist, and…
Read More…n marry princes and “I can marry a princess.” Almost three-quarters of the net movement toward the ban was among parents with kids under 18 living at home. Approximately 500,000 of them moved away from us. The lesson of the Yes on 8 campaign: when parents hear that their kids are in danger, even if it’s a lie some of them believe it—particularly when the lie largely goes unanswered. Fleischer was critical of the No on 8 campaign for not rebutting…
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…favor among mainline Protestants overall, and only somewhat lower than the net 56% approval rating mainliners gave Trump in June of 2020. One might want to be fair to the ELCA’s detractors by noting that White evangelical Protestants turned out in far higher numbers for the former president. So perhaps the matter of ELCA support for Trump is simply a matter of perspective. On the other hand, the ELCA vote for Trump was substantially higher than th…
Read More…um are demanding. No need to make a fuss about the shredding of the safety net to fund even more tax breaks for the ever-wealthier. These priorities are, as Press noted in his column, a long way from Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical that recognized workers’ rights and affirmed the “preferential option for the poor.” Noting that the wealthy can generally take care of themselves, the pope decreed: “It is for this reason that wage-earners, since they…
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…mpact on the environment, Eaton argues, it would also be better for the planet. This is Paleo eschatology, essentially—a vision of the world’s final destination, rendered in the language of an idyllic past. Eaton’s vision did not go over especially well with the other participants in the nutrition conference, most of whom were advocates of vegetarian diets, and most of whom seemed hesitant to suggest reducing the world population by a few billion…
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…et is of course matched by the cruelty of a near-nonexistent social safety net that remains a source of horrified wonderment to observers from other developed countries. Yet again, the reason is racism. As New York Times economic journalist Eduardo Porter points out in American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise, the social supports created in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II were reserved exclusively for whites. W…
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