Religion Dispatches
…anxieties. A cheery website offers articles, webinars, social networking forums, and promotional videos featuring Deseret Media executive (and former LDS Church official) Shari Dew with 1980s-style stock footage of apparently independent women jogging, counting money, and sitting at their kitchen tables with their children. And all of this about 30 years after the LDS Church helped torpedo the Equal Rights Amendment through a concerted political o…
Read More…he be the Tea Party-religious right merger candidate? As I reported in February, Cain co-founded tvTownhall with religious right activist Allen Hardage, who told me “you cannot restore this country to the founding fathers’ vision and exclude the fact that they understood our rights and ability to grow as a nation from our reverence to God.” At the tvTownhall website, the “about” link brings you to an extended biography (and beaming photograph) of…
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…g cry. Nationalism doesn’t have the same appeal as other parts of the Arab world, because nationalist slogans are a mainstay of the ruling Baath party, and religious rhetoric also gives the revolution a higher purpose. Likewise, secularism is associated with the Assad regime, and is thus tainted by the regime’s authoritarianism. Second, Friday congregational prayers were the only place Syrians could gather en masse at the revolution’s start. The r…
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…r their adoption of Saul Alinsky’s tactics. The discussion then moved to Renew America, where Dawn Eden first suggested that maybe Lila Rose wasn’t as bad as James O’Keefe because Rose (unlike O’Keefe’s accomplice) wasn’t “tart[ed] up” in the videos. Eden then seemed to back away from this perspective in some follow-up remarks. The next day, in swooped Christian Hartsock, friend of James O’Keefe, who called Eden’s positions “garbage” and sneered:…
Read More…rogramming robocalls for her. And she’d even been the star of one of those new “I’m a Mormon” LDS Church public relations campaign videos. The Salt Lake Tribune’s pollsters gave Love a 12-point lead on November 2. But against the odds, Jim Matheson held onto his seat, as Love failed to launch her Congressional career. What happened? There was the Libertarian candidate who drew away 5,000 votes—twice as many as Matheson’s 2646-vote margin of vict…
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…Layton in Kurdistan, northern Iraq, who is rebuilding a Christian culture: new Christian schools, new Christian businesses, and more. He is not content to build churches; he wants an entire Christian culture.” Up until this year Layton served as the Erbil director of the Kurdistan Development Corporation, a KRG sponsored venture launched in 2004 to promote, facilitate and establish business and investment opportunities in the Kurdistan Region in I…
Read More…nd Virginia lawmakers have passed a pro-public prayer law that has many religious minorities worried. Soon to retire Senator Joe Lieberman is working on a book about his Jewish faith and his dedication to setting aside the Sabbath. The Archdiocese of New Orleans released a new online database of baptismal, marriage, and funeral records from colonial New Orleans. If you’d like an outdoor funeral pyre, they are available in a small town in Colorado….
Read More…f clergy and people of faith. But of course Evans knows that—in one of the videos included in his recent email blast, he criticizes pro-equality clergy by name. NOM is also using marriage as an attack on Obama in other states. NOM’s Brian Brown and anti-gay strategist Frank Schubert (the misleading mastermind behind NOM’s anti-equality victories nationwide) also hope that Obama’s support for marriage equality will cost him reelection, even though…
Read More…al and anyone else who might have taken offense to his posting. Reddit in search of mindless memes beware: between the cat videos and bizarre news stories you might just find some religious tolerance….
Read More…minute trailer? That’s just offensive. In Islam, the Qur’an is the literal word of God, and Muhammad represents the embodiment of those words of God. If you want to know what Islam is in text, go to the Qur’an; if you want to know what Islam is in action, study Muhammad’s life. That’s what Muslims do. They study it, debate it, and investigate it obsessively. Muslims believe the road to goodness, to moral excellence and success in the afterlife, co…
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