Religion Dispatches
…igins of Totalitarianism, which he called “prophetic in its application to today.” Indeed the Manhattan Declaration itself, dressed up as a celebration of “life,” hauls out the trope that abortion is like genocide or holocaust, and claims that LGBT rights infringe on (real) Christians’ religious freedom. In his video released in conjunction with the Manhattan Declaration, Colson called the Declaration “crucially important for religious liberty,” a…
Read More
…n this issue.” I don’t think that should be as hard as it is. Christianity Today criticized your book, saying: Crafting highly personalized views of God may soothe our church-inflicted wounds, but responding to fracture within the church with personalized gods hardly seems the path toward unity. I wish he had found more hope in the examples of Christians learning, engaging in difficult conversation, and building relationships across perceived chas…
Read More
…ristianity today — and not just among white evangelical Protestants in the South, but also among white mainline Protestants in the Midwest and white Catholics in the Northeast. You can bet that Jones—one of the best pollsters of American religion at work today—has the data to back his argument up. White Christians, as he notes, are much more likely than the average citizen to buy the “heritage not hate” shtick about Confederate monuments, and much…
Read More
…idental casualty of the occupation of Japan and a Jesuit priest working in South America. Zooey (Zachary Martin Glass) was an aspiring actor in 1955, and the youngest daughter, Franny, was on leave from her college due to a spiritual malaise that brought her to the brink of a nervous breakdown. An intensely neurotic family. Also intensely brilliant, intensely attuned, and intensely committed to one another. What prompted Franny’s crisis was her in…
Read More…(whatever it is) hasn’t stopped Shore – or the director, Wayne Kopping, a South African neocon – from going on television to promote their work. The film has been promoted by numerous neoconservative, Jewish, and Christian Zionist outlets and activists, and no doubt Iranium will receive the same treatment, particularly if it is released around election time and could be used to question whether the Obama administration is doing enough to combat T…
Read More…ary North abandoned black people to the terrible lawlessness of a vengeful South. Civil-rights movement leaders were fighting for the federal government to secure their rights against the arbitrary tyranny of the political powers in the Southern states, which maintained their hold on local government through coercion and violence. Paul seems to think that good Christians don’t need civil laws (or civil rights laws, for that matter) for them to do…
Read More
…lay readers: local Mormons who could use something besides insular, faith-promoting history; and non-Mormons outside Utah who could use an informed, even-handed historical account of life “behind the Zion Curtain.” The timing seemed right. The past ten years has been something of a Mormon moment in American media culture. Think about it: the 2002 Winter Olympics, the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping, the Warren Jeffs trial, Mitt Romney’s past and prese…
Read More…strian man convinced authorities to let him take his driver’s license photo wearing a pasta strainer on his head as the religious headgear of his Pastafarianism. The Church of England may sell its $6 million share in the scandalized News Corp. Controversy continues to surround a south Indian temple and its billions in hidden treasure. In the U.S., second-generation Indian Americans are working to Americanize Hinduism. The Hill Cumorah Pageant wrap…
Read More
…the graduate students in philosophy are Protestants, the famous school in South Bend, Indiana, may itself be the “Protestant Notre Dame.” Sloan’s vision, which he called Baylor 2012, was that his university would become a magnet for Christian scholars and a center—perhaps the center—for Protestant intellectual life. I was in Waco to write a feature article for Christianity Today, and I confess that I was intrigued by the audacity of Sloan’s plans…
Read More…opposing “Invictus.” Yes, the new movie about Nelson Mandela and the 1995 South African rugby team. They’re opposing that because, quote, “Mandela is nothing more than a communist-terrorist thug.” So, let’s review, conservative Christians demand that CPAC ditch the group that wants equality for a group of human beings – American taxpaying citizens – commonly known as gays and lesbians in marriage, housing, employment and the military – but has…
Read More