Religion Dispatches
…church’s post-Katrina resurgence wasn’t just a community, but more like a United Nations, or rather United Neighborhoods. And like many civic-minded organizations in New Orleans, they took citizen participation and equity as their bottom-line terms and conditions. Former Mayor Ray Nagin learned as much when in 2006 he opened a landfill to store Katrina debris less than two miles from Village L’est, which is shared by Vietnamese- and African-Ameri…
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…s to polytheistic or Pagan religions parallels contemporary debates in the United States, especially in the wake of groups like The Satanic Temple who have demanded the same privileges enjoyed by the Christian establishment. Following the Greece v. Galloway decision, which authorized public prayers before government events, Chaz Stevens of Florida offered to open a town council meeting with a prayer to Satan. In response, conservative pastor Mark…
Read More…cotton and slavery.” The next day, The Washington Post ran a Religion News Service story from Nairobi reporting on a disturbing trend in Kenya, Uganda, and other countries in the region: “At prayer healing services in some Pentecostal churches, pastors invite people infected with HIV to come forward for a public healing, after which they burn the person’s anti-retroviral medications and declare the person cured.” According to the story by Fredrick…
Read More…. When I first requested permission at school to “pop out and pray” in the United States, I was instructed to be very responsible about not taking too long. It is “prayer time” for Muslims five times a day: fajr (dawn to sunrise), dhuhr (early afternoon), asr (late afternoon), maghrib (sunset to just before dark), and isha (after twilight). Each prayer-time is finite. Muslims who pray regularly are usually on the clock. Svend and I regularly downl…
Read More…ool zones. Do you know where most of the mass murders have occurred in the United States? In gun-free zones. There’s an exception or two but typically it’s where the bad guy has reason to think he’ll have a monopoly of force. It has to be one of the most stupid laws on the books, and yet we’ve had so much inertia because we don’t want guns around children especially when the bad guy is the only who has one. It defies logic, but then being a libera…
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…less others, had been trained at the SOA, and when major newspapers in the United States reported on the torture manuals they used, thousands joined our movement to close the School. It was in giving hundreds of talks about the SOA at churches and colleges that I met many devout women in the Catholic Church who told me about their call by God to the priesthood. These women had been rejected because the Catholic Church teaches that only baptized me…
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…es opposite Hodges, they carried that Christian flag onto the floor of the United States Senate. They attacked, they conquered, they paraded their flag on the vanquished ground . . . and then they said a prayer to Jesus in that senate. Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government. We love you and we thank you. In Chri…
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…et pools of money buying Southern elections is a problem. SCOTUS’ Citizens United decision changed the rules of the game, making it easier for big money to play partisan politics. As John Nichols has said in his book, we are more and more a “dollarocracy.” But we remind our progressive friends who are not up on their Southern history: Poor and jobless people of all races have never had money. That’s the definition of “poor.” But if Harriet Tubman…
Read More…nd their churches. Hughes made his case for toleration by appealing to the United States Constitution and to Americans’ better selves: “Is this state of things, fellow-citizens, and worthy of you, worthy of our country, worthy of our just and glorious Constitution? The vicinity of lower Manhattan was also the venue for signing of one of the most significant pieces of legislation in the twentieth century. At Liberty Island on October 3, 1965, Lyndo…
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…o an analysis by Samantha Sokol in the legislation department at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, about 74 Project Blitz model bills were considered in 2018. “More than 60 percent involved promoting Christianity in public schools; more than a third were ‘In God We Trust’ display bills,” according to reporting from Church & State. In 2017, there were only three such bills—but in 2018 over 25 were introduced. They passed in five…
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