Religion Dispatches
…ding up to this year’s election.“ (For more on Pray the Vote, go here) The promo for Craig Detweiler’s new book Into the Dark reads: “Detweiler, a well-respected film expert and media spokesperson on Hollywood and Christianity, examines forty-five twenty-first-century films that resonate theologically—from The Lord of the Rings trilogy to Little Miss Sunshine—offering groundbreaking insight into their scriptural connections and theological applica…
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…inciple that imagining creates reality has captivated modern readers,” the promo copy explains. The publisher probably didn’t expect the book to resonate quite so uncomfortably with the political moment when they chose November 8th—Election Day—as its publication date. But indeed, Donald Trump’s distinctive style has roots in the spiritual tradition of which At Your Command and The Secret are both a part. Neville was just ahead of his time. Born i…
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…ergefell will fall. The decision will be handed down most likely in June of 2024, but almost certainly no later than June 2025. This will cause havoc for LGBT couples. Overnight, 34 states will go back to banning same-sex marriage, and most of them don’t have viable mechanisms in place to bring it back. Horrible legal questions arise: Will marriage licenses issued by Texas between 2015 and 2024 still be legal? What about military couples stationed…
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…ches will present a series of articles from the magazine’s Fall 2023/Winter 2024 issue. To fight a War on Terror, the state needs terrorists. Indeed, it creates them. As author, researcher, and organizer Dr. Maha Hilal observes, “If you followed the logic of the U.S. government when it comes to post-9/11 detentions, the prevailing wisdom seems to be that if you treat a person like a terrorist, they become one.”[1] The Public Eye, Fall 2023/Winter…
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…mocratic voters (83%) and Independents (73%) are Skeptics or Rejecters. The 2024 election will be largely contested over the few Republicans suspicious of Christian nationalism and Independents friendly to it. You can literally map out these differences. Blue states have very low levels of support for Christian nationalism. Red states are just the opposite. And the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisc…
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…e of the Faith, the Vatican office in charge of such matters, on January 4, 2024. This move contradicted the clear statement in the original Declaration that “no further response should be expected about possible ways to regulate details or practicalities regarding blessings of this type” (par. 41). The Declaration caught so many people off guard that the new and controversial Prefect of DDF, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández (whose earlier writing…
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…hild after child after child to “delight” in, or, like the women on stage, promote path #1 to other women. It’s inconceivable that some women might not want that life because to them, the central feature of womanhood is the desire to have children. Recalling the “pre industrial era where lots of children were necessary to be running the farm,” Waters encourages us to see children as “your team members, playing a necessary role.” Endorsing “trad-wi…
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…h 2016 and 2020. There is absolutely no reason to think that will change in 2024. Instead of suggesting that there might be some significant section of (White) “faith” voters who can be reached given that fewer than half of White evangelicals view Trump as a “somewhat religious” man (6% of them deem him “very religious”), one should pause here to ask how the distinctive faith of these demographics affects their vote—particularly in light of data t…
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…ramifications for the upcoming presidential elections. At the beginning of 2024, mention of a report on Russian persecution of Ukrainian Christians started showing up in some evangelical publications, mostly notably in a February 6 story in Christianity Today. The report, “Faith Under Fire: Navigating Religious Freedom Amidst the War in Ukraine,” was published in November 2023 by Mission Eurasia (an evangelical mission agency founded when the Sov…
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…1789, to 1917, to 2020” who erroneously thought politics should not only “promote and support virtue,” but should “usher in universal harmony.” The bottom line, as Hazony puts it, is that “you’ve been dispossessed. And what we’re watching…is a completely new America in which liberalism has been replaced by this woke neo-Marxism as the dominant ideology.” And so now, “for us Christians,” as Rod Dreher, senior editor at the American Conservative an…
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