Religion Dispatches
…leaders. It allows individuals to use undisclosed nonprofit contributions to generate huge paydays that don’t have to be reported as a nonprofit salary. Among others adept at such arrangements is the American Center for Law and Justice’s Jay Sekulow, who has, according to investigative news stories, turned his advocacy work into a lucrative business for the whole family….
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…e last three popes, Boteach gets down to his Glenn Beck-ish business: “The American Evangelical community has proven the most stalwart and reliable friend of Israel in the United States.” Christians and Jews are now “brothers” because “together they confront the implacable foe of Islamist terrorism.” Later Boteach writes that “Christian Evangelicals have proven themselves stalwart when it comes to foreign policy, fighting terrorists, and standing…
Read More…eight workers can’t find any job; among younger males, especially African-Americans, the number is much higher—in many areas one in two workers is without work. Yet Congress, with a Democratic majority, can’t get it together to extend unemployment benefits. Our solons just flew out of town for a weeklong holiday vacation. Republicans, joined by Democratic deficit hawks, insist that any extension be “deficit neutral” and come out of unspent stim…
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…book whose lead characters are almost all Arabs and Muslims. Do you think American readers can go for that? Do you think it will be easy to make the readers identify with peoples who are usually ignored, misunderstood, or often even disliked? I’m pretty optimistic. I think the premise is intriguing enough to overcome whatever initial reservations some readers might have, and once they get into the story I think they’ll find the characters easy en…
Read MoreOne of the reasons I left the news business nearly ten years ago was because the media’s idea of “balanced” reporting had become increasingly neurotic and, well, unbalanced. Our modern media believes that balance means finding one example of a story it has decided to pursue on one side of the issue, and then find another single example on the other side of the story then simply compare and contrast. Voila! Balance. That’s what NPR has done in thi…
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…subtle tracing of the biblical lines of influence on a number of important American writers, especially Melville, whose Moby Dick also counts as the single most important work of American fiction by no less a religious and cultural critic than Cornel West. Bragg’s book is an extraordinary compendium of information, less about the creation of the KJV than about its long cultural aftermath. It thus supplements the story of the creation of KJV as tol…
Read More…he time he was 34; Perry married at 32. There’s a whole lot of red-blooded American male hijinks Mitt Romney skipped out on because he was an observant Mormon, and perhaps he missed out on a few lessons in mainstream fraternizing and jocularity as well. Perhaps his leadership style reflects an uneasy adaptation of the culture of Mormon leadership to a mainstream American political setting. From the time they are 12 years old—if not younger—Mormon…
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…servative tenets were second nature to many, but public opinion was mixed: Americans were wary of big government, but they desperately needed its help. World War II changed the nature of the debate as business leaders took government jobs and watched their companies thrive in the wartime economy. Congress rolled back many of FDR’s pro-worker initiatives, and the right’s focus shifted from the New Deal to the New World Order. Conservative organizat…
Read More…al family), as well as the “rights of the unborn,” were fundamental to the American political experiment and made immutable by their divine origin. Constitutional Progressives has produced a blistering video demonstrating how “Constitutional Conservatives love the Constitution – except for the parts they don’t:” Constitutional Progressives is, in the words of Doug Kendall, president of Constitutional Accountability Center, which is spearheading th…
Read More…tue of Liberty, “corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation.” Whether they knew it or not, then, the terrorists who guided those fuel-gorged jets into the World Trade Center were targeting the very heart of America—not because of the buildings’ association with business or commerce, but because their location in lower Manhattan has long symbolized America’s noblest ideals. Our response in the decade since 9/11 has be…
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