Religion Dispatches
…not at all convinced that they would make a difference for Pain in Iowa or South Carolina, although they more obviously could in Florida. Frum, a Republican Jewish Coalition board member, complains in his column that Palin snubbed the group’s offers to sponsor her Israel trip, as it has done for other presidential hopefuls, instead booking it through a Christian tour agency. He thinks, perhaps, that Palin is miffed that he and other RJC board memb…
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…map, a staple of humanitarians that shows the true vastness of the global south. The burden on these men feels just as vast. Mercifully, though, their way of life doesn’t allow for a whole lot of time for agonizing. As Trappist monks—the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, officially—they gather in the church several times a day to chant prayers, from before dawn until after dusk. In between, they’re busy with “spiritual reading” and o…
Read More…g happen in the Middle East prophetically? You are seeing the King of the South come together with lightning speed. Egypt has an army of one million men armed with 1500 Abram Tanks which are America’s best. We sold them to Egypt along with hundreds of our latest and greatest fighter jets because Egypt was controlled by Mubarak who was America’s friend. Can you imagine what Israel faces with Iran, Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Russia coming after the…
Read More…n a decade Kohler was shipping the work to new non-union facilities in the South. Just last year the current magnate—yet another Herbert Kohler—pushed through a greatly weakened contract for the small number of Local 833 members still employed in Wisconsin. I say all this to make the point that American business and its “business-friendly” sock puppets like Gov. Scott Walker will stop at nothing—nothing—to roll back worker rights and worker securi…
Read More…a recent Iowa briefing had been distributed to 5,000 churches. Talk about free advertising! The other Republican candidates have griped about their exclusion from speaking at the pastors’ briefings. While Lane insisted that he had invited all the candidates, Darrell Ng, a spokeperson for the Fred Thompson campaign, said Thompson was only invited to attend, not to speak, and produced the form invitation the campaign received. He added, “it’s clear…
Read More…businesses also is reminiscent of those who defended Jim Crow laws in the South. Those business owners, too, thought they had a right to serve whomever they pleased and bar whomever they hated. But, if you’re a business open to the public—no matter how private your ownership—you must be open to the entire public. This is the basis of “equal treatment” and the government has a right to enforce that. So, Rev. Davis and his cohorts want the governme…
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…arly made a point of explicitly incorporating the sounds and styles of the African American sacred tradition, as in Aretha Franklin’s 1972 live album, Amazing Grace. Recorded with the Rev. James Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, the album remains Franklin’s most popular. And as Franklin and other artists from this era went out of their way to foreground their musical r…
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…can Catholicism, ever produced. Father Matthew was neither famous nor self-promoting, which is what makes the lyrical strains of the notes he did produce so very eloquent and so very worth our hearing. Both men seem to me now the product of a different age and a different time, and more to the point, both men were the result of a different way of inhabiting time—a monastic, a poetic, and ultimately a rather silent way. Both men came of age in post…
Read More…high school clubs. Next up: atheists. The Secular Student Alliance, which promotes atheism and humanism with chapters at more than 200 colleges, is sending in reinforcements for teen free-thinkers—a push to launch 50 new high school clubs. Godless teens want the same social benefits that evangelical teens find at the annual “See you at the pole” flagpole prayer events at thousands of schools every September, and the court-sanctioned afterschool B…
Read More…ded on many Muslims for its economic success. On the one hand, many of the African slaves that worked to produce the raw materials of early American industry were Muslims. On the other hand, during the trade of goods between India and New England, some of America’s trading partners were South Asian Muslims. These two economic factors helped keep the young country afloat in the first decades of the nineteenth century. (Check Kambiz GhaneaBassiri’s…
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