Religion Dispatches
…dition, Austin attorney Brian Russell, whom board member Cynthia Dunbar recruited to run for her seat, lost his race to a moderate Republican. Dunbar, who is retiring, is a dominionist and has said public education is evil. Another conservative, Ken Mercer, is facing a serious challenge from a pro-education candidate in the fall election. Next year, just in time for the textbook review, the far-right Christian conservatives may no longer hold a ma…
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…do that, even if solely from among other religious believers. Theocracy is rule by clerics. Democracy is rule by majority. Democracy does not depend upon a secular motivation. Incidentally, Frederick’s defense of President Obama’s call to believers to translate their religious concerns into nonreligious language lends support to my original Constitutional proposal. I called for government and nonbelievers to perform this same operation of translat…
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…religious diversity in America is a messy, complicated, and confusing social reality not limited to one theological vision of a Father in Heaven, or a Creator of the Universe, or a Lord who is the Supreme Ruler. God can be found in sex, drugs, and rock and roll; God is love, peace, and war; God lives in anything, everything, and nothing at all; God evolves, is eternal, and is an illusion….
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…ortray themselves within the virtual world. Filiciak quips that in MMORPGs today, “hundreds of thousands of players are finding themselves in situations described by postmodern theorists, even though the vast majority of them have never heard of Baudrillard.” The “crucified” player, Cynewulf, must have watched with curiosity as Christian viewers claimed his experience was too Christlike. Certainly, Cynewulf himself could feel no pain as he “hung”…
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…tney, and Teen Mania founder Ron Luce. Engle, per his custom, likened his crusade against abortion to Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement. He rocked back and forth, as though davening, preached against Roe v. Wade, and shouted, as the crowd prayed and spoke in tongues, “this is a Passover Day for America. Today, we plead the blood of Jesus on the doorpost!” Purity covenants, requiring abstention from even thinking about sex outside of m…
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…dden urban areas riddled with drug and gang warfares, as I do, this recent ruling brings a heightened concern about personal safety. But this ruling also heightens concerns about personal safety for those of us who rely on hate crimes laws to protect us from the bigoted actions of our fellow citizens. “I can see some crazed fool come into a bar where gays hang out or my homeys and shoot the hell out of us,” Adam Williams told me. Williams is an Af…
Read More…faux sacrilege of a celebrity Jesus. “So, not all of the New Testament is true,” encouraged a reporter to Carlin’s Christ. “Nah,” he replied, “Some of that gospel stuff never happened at all. It’s just made up. Luke and Mark used a lot of drugs.” Typical among his riffs was his reply to the existence of angels. “What is all this shit about angels? 3 out of 4 people believe in angels. What? Are you fucking stupid?” Listening to Carlin offers no pen…
Read More…lson told Religion Dispatches. “Tens of millions of Americans have seen my video on TV and read Hagee’s statements in newspapers, and the media treatment of Hagee’s statements has not been, for the most part, very favorable.” “The volatile views of Hagee and some other leading Christian Zionists have been an elephant on the table of American politics for decades,” Fred Clarkson, the co-founder of Talk2Action told RD. “Many books and articles have…
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…ly beaten and detained, without charge, by Israeli Border Police in East Jerusalem, I thought to myself, why doesn’t this change everything? By everything, I mean the understanding, or at least an acknowledgement, over here, in American Jewish conversation, of the occupation. After all, can you look at Tariq Abu Khdeir’s swollen, bruised, and bloody face, or at the video of the police officers pummeling him on the ground, and not say to yourself,…
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…not a denomination, there are no doctrinal or membership requirements. Thousands of independent, non-denominational churches across the country preach a version of the Word of Faith doctrine, and millions of believers have incorporated at least some aspect of it into their spiritual lives. A 2006 study of Pentecostal and Charismatic movements by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that nearly half of all American Christians agreed wit…
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