Religion Dispatches
…hrough the gate leading to the water, one must punch in a combination pass code. The town’s elegantly manicured gardens belie its state’s housing market collapse. But just outside of town, realtors advertise “Free Foreclosure Lists!” Sitting along a commons of lush grass, an attractive young couple casually dressed in designer sunglasses, khakis, and expensive sandals led a group of fair-haired children in prayer. The young blond woman urged the c…
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…that the new museum would promote tolerance “just as building health clubs promoted health.” This was not the first time that the Wiesenthal Center and the LA Museum of Tolerance formulated its own foreign policy; and in doing so implied that they were speaking for the American Jewish community at large. The center endorsed enthusiastically the Bush administration’s Iraq War, and in 2006 it dubbed Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez an anti-Semite. A…
Read More…e made in the committee hearing on the bill last week. “If you look at the code, these codes are dealing with illegal acts. Now, abortion is a legal act. So this has got nothing to do with abortion.” Here is the bill in its entirety: FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to expand the definition of justifiable homicide to provide for the protection of certain unborn children. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA: Section 1. Th…
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…r worldly peers while simultaneously beholden to an arcane and restrictive code of behavior—is actually rather compelling. “Being tugged in one direction by the secular world and in another by the religious world, they have styled their own compromise,” he says, “[and yet] they also feel an unbearable sense of loneliness and despair.” But the extent to which Cohen understands his own motivations for journeying into Christendom is unclear. “I’m hop…
Read More…s of the military, and that is protecting us from our enemies. The Uniform Code of Military Justice also prohibits things like adultery, so as we look at this slippery slope we’re on, what is the next step? Will we see a move to strike down that prohibition as well? Jackson and others speaking at the press conference also repeated the charge that repeal of DADT will cripple chaplains who will be forced to “water down their teachings” or perhaps ev…
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…articularly sensitive nerve. Hell never stopped mattering in America. It’s central to the way many Americans have thought and continue to think of themselves, each other, and their nation. The common claim that hell has been on the outs in America since at least 1800 is simply untrue. If anything, 1800 represented a turning point in the other direction. The idea of universal salvation had appealed to both elites like Chauncy and common folk in the…
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…ntion to the evil we were doing here: medical experiments we were doing on African Americans in Tuskegee, and also on Guatemalans and Hispanics during the same time period. While the Nuremberg trials were going on, we were also involved in human experiments. It’s not to dismiss the evil of the Holocaust, but rather to recognize that there by the grace of God go we—we also are capable of doing that evil. And that’s what we were trying to get at. I…
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…mentalism, new religious movements) associated with socio-cultural groups (African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, poor rural whites) far from the mainline-Protestant elites that more frequently populated the ranks of academic observers. Inadequate thinking about the idea of class, combined with class roles and assumptions that none could escape, resulted in analyses that reinforced existing socioeconomic hierarchies rather than interpret…
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…works, he organizes their Ugandan National Prayer Breakfast and oversees a African sort of student leadership program designed to create future leaders for Africa, into which The Family has poured millions of dollars working through a very convoluted chain of linkages passing the money over to Uganda. And in his more recent book, C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy, Sharlet delved into even more detail about the anti-gay clim…
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…en these liberal Modern ideals and institutions of human enslavement. West Africans and indigenous peoples on the island of Hispaniola must be free. And so they were, for a moment. But as Revolution turned to Terror (tellingly enough, many Haitians were supremely shocked by the appearance of the first guillotine on their island, and stomped it to bits after seeing it used just once… so much for the notorious Haitian appetite for violence, every cu…
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