Religion Dispatches
…on a bevy of political organizations that court—and receive—support from a number of world leaders and US political figures. On January 20, as the inaugural festivities wound down, it was left to the Rev. Joseph C. Lowery, a true hero of the civil and human rights movements, to close out the ceremonies with a benediction. And he didn’t disappoint. With his well-worn voice, Lowery brought the poetry, prose and hardscrabble reality of a life spent i…
Read More…e larger point: Trump is still the one candidate who coalesces the largest number of evangelicals—even the weekly churchgoers—around him. Those numbers would likely shift should Trump face a two-man race with Ted Cruz. But if survey data still show what they have revealed so far—that Trump will continue to win at least a third of the most frequent church-attending evangelicals—it undermines anti-Trump evangelicals’ main argument about the suspect…
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…ile the Muslim population in North America has increased tremendously, the number of Muslim characters on television has remained negligible. The few that exist are of alien, violent men. Think about it. Can you name a Muslim character on television? Was your answer the terrorists in 24, the terrorists in Sleeper Cell, the torturer for the Iraqi Republican Guard on Lost, villains on professional wrestling, or the black Muslim prison inmates on OZ?…
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…sippi Clarion Ledger reported earlier this year that the overall growth in number of interracial couples in Mississippi was behind the national average (less than 2.4 percentage points in Mississippi compared to 2.8 percentage points nationally). According to a report released by Pew Research Center in 2017, only 9% of Americans say that interracial marriage is “a bad thing,” while 17% of respondents to a 2018 YouGov poll said that interracial mar…
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…nsive footage filmed around the world, a viewer can count on two hands the number of women, including two heads of state, who have any semblance of agency and are real actors in cooperation with Francis. Instead, his bishops, secretaries, interreligious colleagues, escorts, and welcomers are all men all the time. It may seem churlish to point out this dynamic in light of Francis’ many good works. But it’s a telltale sign of an institution that nee…
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…erican society, whether that be in politics, cultural institutions, or any number of other areas of life. That means doing more than simply being right about this one thing: the nonexistence of gods. It means finding partners who share our values and interests and working together to make this world a better place to live.” Clarifying that latter point, Fish noted, “Our advocacy is going to continue working to find areas of common ground with part…
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…the many differences between various Jewish and Christian sects in how to number and interpret these different sets of commandments. All of this I explain in my book, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American. Seemingly small differences are magnified because Christianity has historically claimed to possess ultimate truth, so any deviation from an absolute truth is significant. Minor variations are further magnified by, as James…
Read More…t’s not a proud day for freedom of religion when a prominent member of the number two most disliked major religion in America effectively sides against a honest project by the number one most disliked major religion in America. Especially when Mormons have just recently come through our own years-long struggle to build an LDS temple in Center City Philadelphia after Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter tried to extract a six-figure sum from the Churc…
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…them. That’s what severed the relationship. Academic Quality A surprising number of courses asked little more of students than to memorize Bible verses or learn basic details of biblical stories so that they could fill in the blanks on tests. Some made very questionable choices about the use of classroom time, such as the course that spent two days watching “the historic documentary Ancient Aliens,” which presents “a new interpretation of angelic…
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…re was the usual riff that Obamacare was “socialized medicine,” a stunning number of the comments groused about the birth control mandate. There’s significant evidence from earlier Pew Foundation polling that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the contraceptive mandate and the subsequent war on “religious liberty” they ginned up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the…
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