Religion Dispatches
…vious examples include contemporary statements pairing assertions that the United States is a Christian nation with political opposition to universal health coverage, social justice, entitlement spending, and a whole array of benefits to all US citizenry.The subtext of these assertions is that such social benefits burden “real [read white] Americans” with taking care of those “other [read colored] people” living within the US borders. US airwaves…
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…ur Balfour, a Christian Zionist, mobilized Britain, France, Italy, and the United States and issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917. According to this official document, the British Crown promised to establish a European-Jewish homeland in Arab-majority Palestine at the expense of indigenous majority Palestinians. In 1919, with utter disregard for the Palestinians, Balfour attributes this support to shared colonialist and messianic values; in the…
Read More…een ready to bravely blame somebody else for the problems of life in these United States. Given conservative evangelical support for—and by “support for” we mean “control over”—the Trump administration, it should come as no surprise that on the subject of religious liberties, the story has been one step forward, two steps back … then another two, and give me three more just for good measure. First, the good news: A poll this December shows that no…
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…s to the far corners of the globe: Canada, South Africa, Australia and the United States. Thus Orthodoxy emerged in the United States as an immigrant church, the church of Southern and Eastern European immigrants, as well as Arabs—all of whom occupied the lower rungs of America’s all-important racial pecking order. Consequently, respectability and assimilation quickly became important goals of these communities. This longing for assimilation, if n…
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…riously thinks that Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland, or Iceland, or even the United Kingdom and Germany, have any meaningful democratic domestic consensus? Who seriously thinks that the people in those countries have any meaningful options in how their countries respond to the current economic crisis—which affects a whole range of domestic social policy and priorities? And how will the Arab world possibly be any different? The source of much of the…
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…ve Romanians are Orthodox Christians. Unlike self-described witches in the United States and Western Europe, Romanian witches do not see their practice as a religious tradition distinct from Christianity. Instead their rituals appear to be syncretic, combining Christian and pre-Christian symbols. The sign of the cross is ubiquitous in witch rituals and some blessings require candles purchased from a church. However, the summer solstice is consider…
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…t court as if they owned it); and a former acting solicitor general of the United States who is now a partner at Hogan Lovells (the world’s fourth-largest law firm), representing the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. Government, military, and Christian nationalism versus the simple principle woven into the fabric of our Constitution: the separation of state and church. It was a striking dichotomy. Trying to prognosticate a ca…
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…as one among many who participated in protests in 170 locations around the United States. As the police gathered in numbers, as they ran towards us in the street, I felt an odd sense of hope. The ridiculously extreme response of authorities in Ferguson is an inverse measure of the potential of this movement. For people invested in white rule and racial disparity, the current protests are, indeed, a threat to the American way of life. But for many…
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…it is wrong to do so. Someone who is aiming for the highest office in the United States, as Santorum is, should be held to a high moral standard, as the strong historical and current socioeconomic ties between The Netherlands and the United States should be held in high standing. All this leads me to the following conclusion: a man who uses such blatant false claims in order to promote his own agenda is either very devious or shockingly ignorant….
Read More…od in the way of same-sex families being able to travel as a family to the United States.” Thinking Strategically At least two gatherings in the past week focused on the strategic promotion of LGBT equality abroad. On Friday, December 6, in Washington, D.C., the Center for Transatlantic Relations, which is part of the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, hosted a presentation called “LGBT Rights: A Geost…
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