Religion Dispatches
…side of Temple Square, cheerfully singing hymns from the screens of their iPhones or from green-backed hymnals, while a clutch of protestors—evangelical Christians, mostly, the same familiar, ragged gang materializing every conference—takes its place behind barricades on a small patch of grass. A stranger, upon learning that I don’t have one of the highly-coveted tickets to the Sunday Conference sessions, spontaneously offers me his last extra. Mi…
Read More…think Sanders and his movement will be strongly influential. There are any number of priorities Sanders could choose from, of course. God knows it’s not like our nation isn’t in need of reform. At the moment, though, I’m less concerned with the pros and cons of any one issue than wondering what things might look like if Bernie tapped into what Rev. William Barber has named “fusion politics.” In the Christian Century, Jeremy Borden describes this a…
Read More…belongs to a Church that strictly prohibits tobacco use, apparently had no reservations about promoting tobacco in countries which had no or few regulations on the promotion or use of tobacco products. In fact, the documents show that this was the clear objective of American tobacco companies who were facing declining sales at home due to increased government regulations and scrutiny. Romney has spoken of his personal disdain for tobacco, revealin…
Read More…ression, blood, and violence beneath the freedom it proclaims. Pawlenty gives us Martin Luther King Jr. but not the church bombings, police dogs, and fire hoses. He gives us a quaint picture of horses and wagons but no images of American Indian removal, Indian wars, and shrinking reservations. He gives us the fall of the Berlin Wall but not McCarthyism. It’s an ad for a book (a book that isn’t selling that well, apparently) and not a history less…
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…Rather than studying how people live Jewish lives, the emphasis is on the numbers of bodies that “count” as Jewish. More disturbing still are the legacies of scientific racism evident in the language of “intermarriage,” “in-marriage,” and “out-marriage.” We suspect that such constructs may unintentionally amplify intra-Jewish prejudice and discrimination towards non-Ashkenazi and non-white Jews. This shapes an academic field in which people of ce…
Read More…, which together extend their ecclesial jurisdiction over 6 federal Indian reservations in South Dakota. By 2010, more than 65 Catholic priests and religious formerly employed at Indian boarding schools within those dioceses had been named in lawsuits targeting sexual abuse—a number that suggests a far higher per-capita rate of offending clergy than even in New Mexico. In New Mexico, the victims of abuse were mainly Nuevomexicano and Indigenous ki…
Read More…g at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting, albeit it with some reservations on the part of the audience. President Trump, never one to be overshadowed, prayed next to Paula White at a closed-door White House dinner with evangelical leaders and huffed and puffed about challenges to his authority coming in the fall elections. Turns out he was right about the impending disaster at the polls, just not the violent overthrow part. Ah, well….
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…ng to a group, to conform to the rules of the group and maybe sometimes to change the rules of the group if the individual is very reflective and smart. It comes out of this basic need for sociality and that need is rooted in the big changes in the mammalian brain that enabled parents to care for offspring. When you think about frogs and lizards, the mom lays her eggs and off she goes. In the case of mammals, they’re warm-blooded and need a lot of…
Read More…y utilized this narrative to push American Indians off their land and into Reservations, because God’s providence had destined this land to (White) Americans. Even the Bush administrations goal of “spreading democracy” smacks of the same sacred narrative that America has a Providential place in the world and its history. Obama shifts the sacred narrative. The President moves the foundational narrative from one of religion (not Christian or Jewish…
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…of individual state laws now on the books—or it may be a pivotal moment of change in the bitter battle over abortion. Narrow attacks on reproductive rights, whether from the Catholic or Protestant right, ignore the full range of issues that are involved in an unintentional pregnancy, including poverty, discrimination, abuse and violence, lack of jobs and health care, and—underlying it all—the effects of racism and sexism. They ignore the serious h…
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