Religion Dispatches
…or who strikes it rich through oil and blood, but about the rebirth of the United States as a world force at the start of the twentieth century. And his first great film, Boogie Nights, is about a porn star, but also a cultural history moving from the 1970s to the Reaganite ’80s, and shifting attitudes toward sex, drugs, and rock and roll. He’s a great filmmaker, with a brilliant grasp of imagery (even the choice to shoot much of the film in 65mm…
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…o continued the controversial marital practice. According to the Apostolic United Brethren, they were charged with continuing the “fundamentals” of the faith—namely polygamy—after the LDS Church essentially brought an end to the practice in 1904. Over the past two years, the legal and criminal status of polygamy in the US has once again been at the center of public attention. At the start of the 2020 Utah legislative session, Senator Deidre Hender…
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…rs, with 61% of Republican respondents saying they supported declaring the United States a Christian nation. Christian nationalism is having a moment. Scholars and journalists are signaling its dangers in articles, op-eds, and books. Preachers and politicians are encouraging their flocks to take on the identity proudly as a way to blend their faith and politics. Yet, even if Christian nationalism has become part of common parlance over the last ha…
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…church’s post-Katrina resurgence wasn’t just a community, but more like a United Nations, or rather United Neighborhoods. And like many civic-minded organizations in New Orleans, they took citizen participation and equity as their bottom-line terms and conditions. Former Mayor Ray Nagin learned as much when in 2006 he opened a landfill to store Katrina debris less than two miles from Village L’est, which is shared by Vietnamese- and African-Ameri…
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…as one of the largest Israeli diasporas in the world, only exceeded by the United States. Israel has better relations with Germany than any other country in the EU, while ultra-Orthodox Jews have been returning to Poland and Hungary and purchasing property once owned by Jews before the war. The famous Yeshivat Hokhmei Lublin, for example (which became a Nursing School during and after the Nazi occupation), is now in Jewish hands again. Head for th…
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…ently proclaimed his love of the AR-15: “This is a gun manufactured in the United States, creates jobs in the United States, it’s a made-in-America gun. We have national everything, why not have a national gun? It saves lives on a daily basis, and it’s not reported. And I think it’s good to have that contrast.” This, of course, is a blatant lie—AR-15s do not “save lives,” they are used to kill. After the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde,…
Read More…ligious freedom and child protection masks a deeper cultural divide in the United States—the one between individual liberty and group solidarity. We live in a country in which 44 percent of the population believe that government aid to the poor does more harm than good, and a bare majority of 51 percent think that smaller government is better than bigger government. At the same time, recent polls indicate 70 percent of Americans support “Medicare…
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…xceptionalism. Dunbar-Ortiz, whose 2014 Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States won wide acclaim, appropriately brings her vast knowledge of white Europeans’ genocidal treatment of Native Americans to bear in this new volume. But she adds new layers of insight by treating the Europeans’ “savage wars” against the indigenes in tandem with the whites’ overwhelming need to control Black bodies in building a hugely powerful economy based almos…
Read More…on to maintain that because homosexuality hasn’t been “restrained” in the United States, “I don’t think it’s going to be good for the nation, it sweeps into the education system, and the church is going to end up losing its privilege to have its own voice. Gender rights, will trump religious rights. I think it’s wrong, it’s not good for society. Those are the statements I came with, so frankly I was quite surprised to be thrown into this huge con…
Read More…ons. These denominations, the Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), United Methodist Church, and United Church of Christ, have been leading members of the 38 member communions of the National Council of Churches. Mainline leaders recognize that Religious Freedom Institute leaders, Executive Director Kent Hill, Chairman Thomas F. Farr, and signatory neoconservative Catholic Robert P. George have all played leadership roles in the neoconserva…
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