Religion Dispatches
…reedom without fear. I entered the square to witness first-hand the million-man march called for a few days after the “Day of Wrath” on January 25th and the “Friday of Anger” that followed. It was a carnival of political will celebrating a new confidence in the air. It seemed nothing less than Providential. From that vantage point, utter depression soon entered the scene with the violent clashes erupting in Tahirir square a couple of days later. P…
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…t is likely to be smaller than usual due to pandemic conditions. Some would-be marchers have said they will not be attending because proof of at least one coronavirus vaccination is needed in DC to access indoor spaces such as restaurants. This is not surprising given that white evangelical Christians—who are overwhelmingly anti-abortion—are also the American demographic most likely to refuse vaccination against COVID-19. For those who do attend,…
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…been a loser as a political candidate. His political party, Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf, has yet to win any major political seats (although that could change with the upcoming May elections.) Also, Khan can no longer command the fast ball like he did in the early ’90s. He is prone to political flip-flopping and also outlandish promises such as vowing to end corruption in Pakistan in 90 days. He doesn’t have facial hair, which is a problem even though…
Read More…man-made causes of climate change, making the list of the “seven most anti-gay U.S. Representatives,” and for leading a personal crusade to defund National Public Radio. As early as March, he declared his support for Donald Trump if the recently evangelically “converted” brander of a fraudulent “university” won the nomination. Lamborn’s resolution/symbolic gesture reads, in part, as a history lesson, pointing to times when John Adams declared day…
Read More…ent would not commit collective suicide once the date of their apocalypse, March 31, 1998, had passed without incident. In 1996 the FBI gave negotiators the authority to prolong the confrontation with an armed group in Jordan, Montana, until it was defused by intermediaries. Both resolutions advanced the government’s understanding that each group has specific ultimate concerns, myths, forms of enactment, and languages that require expert decoding…
Read More…specific duration. Indonesia renders a 30-day visa upon arrival—and so a 30-day visa, a 14-day visa, etc., could be standard, then used according to people’s actual date of arrival. Anyway, I digress. I told them that whenever they began the processing I would FedEx my passport back to them for processing. Travel is my life and I needed my passport back. Just having it sit in their office when I could be using it was not the right fit for me. So t…
Read More…can puzzle pretty much everyone who stops to think about it: Mormons, post-Mormons, non-Mormons. I doubt mine is the only post today or this week addressing the strange situation. (Jana Riess wrote about it on Ash Wednesday.) The church has created media to encourage people to think more of Easter during Holy Week, regardless of what happens in Sacrament Meeting this Sunday. Part of the reason for it is the influence of New England Congregational…
Read More…ned a theocracy rather than a democracy. (Barton, who once served as the co-chair of the Texas Republican Party, advised the state’s Board of Education on the rewriting of its curriculum standards.) Right Wing Watch noted last week that Green’s candidacy is supported by Houston activist Steven Hotze, who believes Green would “vote against a liberal judiciary who will march lock step with Obama on the path to socialism.” Hotze is not an inconsequen…
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…ith Bibles and bandages. Around that time, while working on Bad Faith—a yet-to-be-completed book focusing on the financial forces behind the religious right—Mike Reynolds* got wind of the Nashville, Tennessee-based America 21, a nonprofit political action committee that hopes to bring America to God by encouraging “moral leadership from our churches” to be heard “in the halls of Congress and across this nation.” According to Reynolds, an investiga…
Read More…Gingrich hopes the church of Trump will catapult him to the top of the fend-for-yourself heap. The televangelist pilgrimage is hardly new. Mike Huckabee is now himself a televangelist of sorts, having learned at the feet of televangelist James Robison, who wants a Christian president, particularly one who would revise the tax code “so we can rejoice together because it would stimulate economic growth.” (Huckabee’s hosted debate, though, this past…
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