Religion Dispatches
“I heard hundreds of these evangelical sermons—heard hundreds of the most fearful and vivid descriptions of the tortures inflicted in hell, of the horrible state of the lost. I supposed that what I heard was true and yet I did not believe it. I said: ‘It is,’ and then I thought: ‘It cannot be.’” —Robert Ingersoll, 1896 I connected instantly with Kate Blanchard’s May 10 piece, “Coming Out As a Heretic.” I too grew up in a Christian family, and, de…
Read More…nstituency in the Republican Party—and that their support arguably was the most important reason why President George W. Bush was reelected in 2004—it is at least somewhat surprising that the presidential candidates most closely allied with the religious right (Gov. Mike Huckabee, Sen. Fred Thompson, and Sen. Sam Brownback) did not do better in the campaign for the Republican nomination. To be fair, Huckabee attracted a good deal of support from e…
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…“Dr. Tiller’s murder really affected me,” Sister Donna Quinn, a nun, feminist activist, and former clinic escort (or as she describes it, “peacekeeper”) at a clinic on the south side of Chicago, told me this week. “To think that he was murdered inside a church really brought it home to me.” Doctors and other staff at clinics are heroes, she emphasized, “making sure women are at peace with this decision, making sure they know what they are doing, a…
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…g to accomplish in the classroom is very different from what people think. Most critics assumed that I was teaching students “how to survive the zombie apocalypse.” (I will refer them, now, to the zombie team at Cornell.) Others, because they saw the word “Revelation” in the title alongside a zombie reference, assumed I was teaching my students that there were zombies in the Bible. (There are no zombies in the Bible; the zombie is a creature that…
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…since that first trip in 2003 she spends five months a year in Nepal (the most allowed by her tourist visa) and the other seven months in California fundraising for Chhahari, the organization she founded that runs a home for about two dozen children in Kathmandu. Most of the children are “true orphans,” meaning both of their biological parents are deceased, while a few have a living parent but he or she is incapacitated. “We raise the money in th…
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…ties. The Dutch Calvinists I grew up among—those who worked at Kohler—were mostly strikebreakers. It was a religious conviction among many that the owners should be able to operate their works without union interference. But I am here to argue that at this moment in American life, all clear-thinking people of faith should be rallying around the union banner. If we’re going to draw analogies between Obama’s challenge and FDR’s challenge, we would d…
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…l average of 65 percent, but still problematic for a religious order whose most famous member decries materialist greed on a regular basis. At Jesuit run Seattle University, adjuncts voted to form a union in 2014, but according to the Seattle Times, “ballots were locked up” while the university appealed to the NLRB on religious freedom grounds. According to Seattle University professor Emily Lieb, in April of 2015, “some 20 faculty, students, and…
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…re resourceful sectors of the population, and the closing or distancing of most institutional operations, are dynamics reminiscent of the large scale suburban flight, economic divestment, and governmental indifference experienced within many American cities—and especially within the poorer neighborhoods of those cities in the past one hundred years. Former industrial cities with once sizable populations of blue-collar African-American laborers wer…
Read More…’re just not sure. The numbers attributing warming to human activity rise among moderates and liberals, of course, but they’re not going to vote for Jeb anyway. There is one number Bush might want to worry about, though: 85. That’s the percent of Hispanic Catholics who think climate change is a real problem: For a guy who’s been touting his potential to draw Spanish-speaking voters into the Republican fold, this is a sticky situation. Hispanic Cat…
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…determines which way the election will go—was especially striking because most polls until just before the election found Catholics more reluctant than evangelicals to support Trump. The loss of the Catholic vote is also somewhat disruptive to the narrative that Trump won mainly by appealing to downscale white voters in the Rust Belt. While Trump clearly won these voters, as the New York Times noted, “Trump won his biggest margins among middle-in…
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