Religion Dispatches
…r than aggression on the part of the adversary, as the casus belli for the military jihad, a position they regarded as unethical and morally impermissible. These revisionist conclusions regarding the historical trajectory of jihad have profound implications for the contemporary period. First, they draw our attention to the multiple meanings of jihad that are prevalent in the literature and challenge a monolithic, reductive understanding of the ter…
Read More
…diom of the culture in order to communicate the gospel. While a student in Florida, Graham felt a divine call to preach and began doing so on street corners and, later, as a supply preacher. Several months before completing his studies at Florida Bible Institute, Graham was ordained a Southern Baptist minister. Feeling he needed still more education, however, he enrolled at Wheaton College in the western suburbs of Chicago. There he met, and event…
Read More…the height of the battling, that it was all not such a big deal, that the number of dissidents was actually quite small and that he thought his church would be better off once they were gone. Indeed, according to Wikipedia there are over 7,000 Episcopal congregations in the US with over 2 million members, though the significance of that number is unclear since, as the priest in the church where I was baptized once teased me: “when you’re baptiz…
Read More
…the stage for two long days. While there’s good reason to worry about the number of high-ranking military officers who used the ReAwaken rally to declare war on their political opponents—while attacking US elections and a free press—it was the voices of civilian preachers like Pastor Burns who delivered the most bellicose speeches of the event, unfailingly leaning into violent religious rhetoric. One by one, they warned that the time for battle i…
Read More
No other end-of-year list can hope to offer such profound juxtapositions: a groundbreaking female Mennonite pastor alongside an “immortalist”; the transcendent wisdom of a civil rights leader alongside one of the most hate-filled religious figures in contemporary memory. But here it is, a connect-the-dots portrait of a powerfully complicated American religious landscape, circa 2014. Vincent Gordon Harding Historian and theologian Vincent Gordon H…
Read More
…he [imagined] danger through aggression and power.” As Beinart argues, the number of American Jews who act out of fantasied oppression is declining. But their political strength remains much greater than their numbers. Yet curiously Lerner, the professional psychologist, downplays this and the other psychological wellsprings of support for militant Zionism. Instead he focuses time and again on compassion for the very real historical sufferings of…
Read More
…lescing in the 1977 “Save Our Children” campaign to rescind a Dade County, Florida anti-discrimination ordinance. Both types of coverage set gay sexuality over and against monogamous heterosexual families. In stories such as the Florida repeal, opponents of homosexuality, like the campaign’s spokeswoman Anita Bryant, explicitly argued that the ordinance was immoral and anti-family. In articles about gays’ open sexuality, narratives implicitly set…
Read More
…rd the military (assuming the revolution succeeds, it’ll only succeed with military support). The same Egyptian military that gets $1.3 billion from the United States in aid every year doesn’t want to jeopardize that aid—for which reason it will look very suspiciously on any political agenda that wants to antagonize Israel and threaten a major source of its funding. Imagine a cabinet meeting in which a minister, affiliated with the Brotherhood, su…
Read More…said. “In fact, I believe you will see a mass exodus of chaplains from the military if, in fact, the military is forced to throw open its arms to embrace homosexuality.” Nicholson disagreed, saying religious beliefs were once used to make interracial marriage illegal – even in the military. Lifting that ban didn’t “muzzle” any chaplains. “A chaplain in the military today can still oppose interracial marriage, but it’s legal in the United States an…
Read More
…y it clearly and see how it feels upon the tongue: today’s “all-volunteer” military represents a contemporary form of helotry. We give the great majority of our young very little hope for a foothold in our collapsed economy; then we send them off to fight and die (or, given the significant advancements in military field medicine, to return home horribly damaged) in order to “defend” the grossly unequal society that dealt them such a bad hand in th…
Read More