Search for "breaking newstoday cleantalkorg2.ru bbc news Read Breaking News Today news today Politics Stock Market breaking newstoday"

Cherry-Picking in the God Gap: A Post-Election Conversation on the Religious Vote and the Battle to Spin it

By Daniel Schultz and Chrissy Stroop

…onsibly, it’s a neat trick to flip the script in such a way that the anti-Trump public is invited to cheer for America’s most Trumpist demographic. What do you think of all this, and what do you think coverage of religion and politics ideally should look like? Dan: I like how that piece cites one poll to show how much Biden’s support among evangelicals improved over Clinton’s—all the way from 16% to 23%!—and then another to demonstrate that mainli…

Mile-High Identity Politics: What We Can Learn From the Same-Sex Seating Controversy

By Eboo Patel

…ng women, when it comes to deciding their position on abortion. This is a frustrating finding to many cultural progressives who want the link between preferred personal identities like being female and approved politics like being pro-choice to feel inevitable. Alas, many human beings have other ideas about which identities matter most and what those identities mean, and generally speaking they do not like being told what should matter to them and…

“Religious Freedom” and the Conservative Quest for Absolute Truth

By Ira Chernus

…thout end, whose outcome should never be predictable. A claim to absolute truth—any absolute truth—stops the process of democracy. That’s the great issue lurking beneath the specifics of the latest contraception controversy. Though the legal fine points and political cost-benefit calculations of that controversy deserve the discussion they’re getting, it’s a tragedy to ignore, yet again, the essential issue that is at stake whenever religion…

At Jeffress’ First Baptist Church of Dallas, Trump Support Is Part of a 150-Year Tradition

By Daniel Silliman

…ciated Press said the preacher “mostly eschewed politics.” But that’s not true. He ran up to politics and gave it a great big hug. Criswell was called to the pulpit of First Baptist Church in 1944. The next year, he preached a sermon on Christian America. “How indebted we are to the Almighty God for the government under which we live,” he said. “On the personality of God our forefathers launched our great ship of state.” In the sermon, Criswell ba…

Rebuilding the Wall of Separation: A Progressive Discussion on Church & State

By Bruce Ledewitz

…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…

Giuliani’s ‘Truth Isn’t Truth’ Is the Perfect Slogan for Trump’s Nostalgia Politics

By Bradley Onishi

…es, bi-racial people, and the list goes on. What does this have to do with Rudy’s “truth isn’t truth” statement? Everything. Trump’s nostalgia politics recalls a time that didn’t exist in order to create a space—a safe space—where his supporters can inhabit the world they want to exist. Trump gives authority and voice to those who do not want to admit that a majority of Americans are pro-choice; that same-sex couples have a right to marry; that tr…

Why Don’t Republicans Want to Allow Pastors to Endorse from Pulpit?

By Daniel Silliman

…issues. There are still many who support the idea of separating church and politics, of course, but it’s not like this law is actually working. One doesn’t have to look further than Houston to find pastors engaged in politics, even to the point of condemning candidates from the pulpit and organizing petitions to repeal city ordinances in their churches. They do so without losing their tax-exempt privileges, despite the Johnson Amendment. More than…

Media Still Question Whether Trump’s Christians are ‘Real’ Christians

By John Stoehr

…been) the case. God’s universal love, for many Christianities, is secondary to God’s particular (non-universal) punishment of God’s enemies—of the people who stand against Donald Trump. Politics and religion are not separate. They are one. Trump’s Christians don’t pretend otherwise. The rest of us shouldn’t either….

Lincoln, Clinton, and Trump: From Strategy to Spin to Straight-Up Bullshit

By Martin Jay

…on conform, by and large, to this model whenever they varnish or warp the truth. Trump seems to be different. It is not clear that he deliberately dissembles in order to persuade someone else of what he knows is not the case. On many occasions, he gives no indications whatsoever, even after the dubiousness of his claims are unmasked, of having actually harbored a private belief which is then contradicted by his public statements. For example, he s…

Talking Salsa with Douglas Hofstadter, Enigmatic Author of Gödel, Escher, Bach

By Eliot Raynor

…y know if I want to be flattered. I am just more interested in ideas. The truth is, my two kids, Danny and Monica, are not readers of my books. I’m flattered that Danny decided to read Surfaces and Essences this year and he’s twenty-seven now. It’s only half mine, but it’s the first book of mine that he has tackled. Monica, who’s twenty-three, may have read one book. The point is, my kids know I’ve written books, but it’s not like they think of th…