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…
Read More
…g religious within its content, yet a conservative Christian reader in the United States today is likely going to see religious significance in the article nonetheless. Protestants consuming media about substance use a century ago similarly saw significant religious implications whether journalists wrote about it that way or not. The antidrug campaigns of Rear Admiral Richmond Pearson Hobson, an influential Prohibitionist, short-term congressman,…
Read More
…s liberty” of Catholics is under attack in western democracies such as the United States, even as Spadaro and Figueroa criticize its use for political ends: The erosion of religious liberty is clearly a grave threat within a spreading secularism. But we must avoid its defense coming in the fundamentalist terms of a “religion in total freedom,” perceived as a direct virtual challenge to the secularity of the state. While much of their criticism is…
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…
Read More
…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…
Read More
…d by Facebook. And while the story is still unfolding, it’s suspicious, as United Sikhs noted, that this happened during the anniversary of the Indian government’s June 1984 attack on the Sikhs’ holiest shrine. The government of India has a history of censoring communities and dialogues surrounding state-sponsored violence against religious minorities. And, while they silence the voices of dissent, government officials and Hindu nationalists have,…
Read More
…estinians. According to a policy paper from the U.S. State Department, the number of displaced Palestinian persons numbered 725,000 by May 1949. Although Palestinian repatriation and compensation for property was required under the UN Partition Agreement of 1947 and UN Resolution 192, Israeli Foreign minister Moshe Sharett objected on the basis “that their [Palestinian] return would disturb the homogeneity of Israeli areas.” In response, Christian…
Read More…set by the legislative reversals of Ozawa vs. United States and Thind vs. United States (and the shameful Dred Scott decision) would guide the Supreme Court to sanction racializing citizenship and giving the executive branch carte blanche to exclude certain groups. Tuesday’s 5-4 decision proved us wrong. The court’s decision does more than codify exclusionary policies and expand the executive branch’s authority (which the court vigorously attacke…
Read More
…enominational churches (themselves amounting to many millions more) in the United States and abroad. What’s more, NAR teachings about demons, and the urgent call for Christians to conquer culture are increasingly held by the larger evangelical world—even among non-Charismatic and non-Pentecostal communities. The NAR’s unique sense of paranoia about secular culture has mutated and spread to the broader Christian Right, a movement that was already p…
Read More
…consin Conference of the United Methodist Church wrote to Governor Walker: United Methodists state in our 2008 Book of Discipline the following: “We support the right of all public and private employees and employers to organize for collective bargaining into unions and other groups of their own choosing. Further, we support the right of both parties to protection in so doing and their responsibility to bargain in good faith within the framework o…
Read More