Religion Dispatches
…e in Dogma, and Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty. On TV’s The Simpsons and South Park, God is satirically mocked as an old giant with robes and gray hair and a strange looking, insect-eating rodent, respectively. The smash sensation video game, God of War, is now in its third incarnation, showing once again how human glorification of violence often goes hand-in-hand with religious imagery and symbolism. Sometimes the most intense physical experien…
Read More…f one could not follow the language, as many in the audience could not. With continued shows like the one in New York, and Farooqi’s success in South Asia, he is well on his way to reviving this tradition….
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…students from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism on a tour of the South. We arranged a meeting with Moore, who is an engaging man with a good sense of humor. I found myself liking him, even though I consider his ideas and his antics dangerous. In the course of the conversation—a peroration, really—Moore did his schtick about our Christian nation and how the First Amendment protects the “free exercise” of only Christians and Jews because,…
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…e old Norse gods is not about theology or even ethics, but about style and promoting their subculture. In a similar sense, there are neo-Confederates and white nationalists who believe that “Christian-ness” is one aspect of their Western civilization—along with respect for tradition, authority, and whites-only citizenship rights. For this wing of the movement, best exemplified in my book by a now-deceased Washington Times columnist Sam Francis, op…
Read More…h Ministries (a virulent anti-gay organization that has been listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group) argued against allowing gays to serve openly in the US military. The final four paragraphs say more about Lively, the author of the notorious book The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, than about the issue: Masculine-oriented male homosexuality tends also to be pederastic in nature, meaning that it often involves re…
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…ocially influential. The Bakkers even built a theme park, Heritage USA, in South Carolina that not only became one of the premier vacation spots in the nation, it also provided America with the image of the late Jerry Falwell sliding down a water slide while wearing his Sunday best. Unfortunately for their many devoted viewers, the Bakkers’ media reign came to an end in exactly a decade. In 1987 revelations of financial misappropriation and illici…
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…, who had developed a business that extended from North America to Europe, South America, and the Philippines, met a number of politically powerful Republican politicians and conservative religious leaders, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Iran/Contra figure Oliver North, and then-Senator Rick Santorum. Religious leaders like Charles Stanley (a former distributor), Dr. Robert Schuller and the late Dr. D. James Kennedy of Florid…
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…r, more homogeneous time where, at least in geographical enclaves like the South, white evangelical voices went virtually unchallenged. On the left, there is often a similar pining for the era when the “Christian Century” was finally dawning, when Rauschensbusch, Ryan, the Niehbuhrs, and Tillich commanded the national stage, or when mainline leaders took up prominent places alongside King and Heschel in the national Civil Rights Movement. But we a…
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…host of analogies bent on making Puritan obscurity present. John Cotton’s Southampton sendoff in 1630 is “like scoring Nelson Mandela to deliver the commencement address at the neighbor kid’s eighth-grade graduation.” The Old Testament Israelites are to the Puritans “what the blues was to the Rolling Stones.” Talking about Winthrop’s famed speech “A Model of Christian Charity” “without discussing Ronald Reagan would be like mentioning Dolly Parto…
Read More…ance.” A dear friend of mine lost her son several years ago in Greenville, South Carolina. He was hit so hard by his assailant that his brain stem separated from his brain. He died in the hospital hours later. The last thing he heard was his attacker calling him “faggot.” He was only 20-years-old. His attacker spent only one year in jail and is currently out of jail and serving three years of probation. The passage this past week of a measure addi…
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