Religion Dispatches
…of a Broadway show. Jesus is about to make his big entrance only his final number will feature the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Tom Evans, spokesman for Family Radio said their math for setting the return date came from a verse in Luke 17: “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the Son of Man.” According to Camping’s prediction, the Rapture will happen exactly 7,000 years from the date that God first warned people about…
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…sia, China, and India—which have become the backbone of its bottom line, Amway (now operating as Amway Global) is spending millions of dollars on television commercials, and on print ads in newspapers, magazines, and online, laying the groundwork for a return to the Motherland. Founded in 1959 by two high school buddies from Grand Rapids, Michigan, Richard DeVos and the late Jay Van Andel, Amway—short for “American Way”—peddled all sorts of produc…
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…d many homes had been flattened by the quake. “As a Christian guy I have always held tight to the fact that it is better to give than receive,” said Lown, a one-time shop teacher who now works in construction and real estate. “I also have a problem with the way the church in America spends money and I felt that my money could go further by me putting it to use for good. I also really like to travel, have fun, and meet new people.” Kruger says it w…
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…agement with activities or ideas that their own epoch saw as being in some way magical. Modernity is a myth. The term “modernity” is itself vague. There can, occasionally, be value in vagueness, but “modernity” here rests on an extraordinarily elastic temporality that can be extended heterogeneously and in value-laden ways to different regions and periods more or less at the whim of the theorist . It can also pick out or highlight different proces…
Read More…te hearts and minds, and moving people out of the pews across America. The number of nones (people with no religious preference) is on the rise, with over 20% of all Americans claiming this status, and many point to the increased politicization of religion as the cause. This trend of legal victories will, in the long run, very likely create a more secular America. Recent data indicate that this process is already clearly under way. A poll just rel…
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…that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices,” but there are ways to employ social media that do. The definition of activism is contextual and always changing, as are the strategies employed in its name; it’s shortsighted to think that all effective challenges to hegemonic power must take one particular form. The HPA is attempting to take activism in a new direction. Media and culture scholar Henry Jenkins conducted an interview with…
Read More…approached then-Speaker Newt Gingrich about obtaining a room for the small number of Muslim staffers to hold Friday prayers. Gingrinch granted that request, and the tradition continued through the tenures of Speakers Dennis Hastert, also a Republican, and Nancy Pelosi. Over the years, the number of people attending grew, eventually leading to the creation of the CMSA around 2007, when Khan has already left Hill service and was working in the Bush…
Read More…She feels examined by their eyes Is she right or is she wrong? She’s got a number in her pocket And one change of clothes Her innocence is fading Like last years winter snow’s Light a candle in the window So she can see it from the road With all the loving in your heart Welcome her back home. The Docs’ keening for a fallen innocent seems all too prescient, given the recent negotiations over revelations of priestly sexual abuse of both girls and bo…
Read More…and a growing number of conservative African-American candidates. A record number of black Republicans ran in this midterm election (some had already lost their primaries), and two are heading to Congress. Tim Scott will be the first African-American Republican to represent South Carolina in Congress since Reconstruction. (He beat out Strom Thurmond’s son in the primaries.) Iraq war veteran Allen West will be headed to Congress from Florida, despi…
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…yptic literature does not matter. The end of the world is simultaneously always and never here. Type “mark of the Beast” into Google: just recently a man in West Virginia won a court case against the company he works for because he thought that the machine they were using to clock hours was the “mark of the Beast.” That he was wrong—and that the case proved he was wrong—mattered less than his “sincere beliefs” about the usability of the book of Re…
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