Religion Dispatches
…to a veritable boom in the quarrying industry were that still the practice today). The same for homosexuals. And the biblical conditions for divorce are so strict that a woman could be beaten within an inch of her life and still not be allowed to legally separate. The point is that nobody in the mainstream Christian church today would argue any of these propositions. A hundred years ago, that was not necessarily the case. In other words, the defin…
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…the forces of light must now preserve civilization itself. In the face of today’s problems—“financial crisis, decline of our values, the deterioration of the family, rampant greed and materialism… terror and war”—the only way to overcome our “hopelessness” and “fear” is to “return to the values and principles that define us. The Jewish Jesus I have laid out before you embodies these Judeo-Christian values.” In Boteach’s Rohrschach test, the Jews,…
Read More…he decline in “traditional marriage” on divorce. In 2010, for example, the Southern Baptist Convention denounced “the rampant divorce rate in our culture,” claiming it has caused “great social and economic cost, with women and children suffering disproportionately in ways that are incalculable.” Albert Mohler, president of the SBC’s Southern Seminary, has lamented the “post-marriage culture,” claiming at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission…
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…n Reproductive Rights Went Global (London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2023). [26] Southern Poverty Law Center, “World Congress of Families,” Accessed March 6, 2024; Political Research Associates, “Profiles on the Right: World Congress of Families,” November 4, 2013; Stroop, “A Right-Wing International?” [27] Neil Datta, “Tip of the Iceberg: Religious Extremist Funders against Human Rights for Sexuality & Reproductive Health in Europe,” European Parliamen…
Read More…a lot of people about the significance of evolution and how it got us here today. More importantly, it seems to have engaged the science education community to develop ways to address the teaching of evolution more directly. Today, evolution education has gained prominence with a host of new teaching programs. Certainly in the case of Dover, teachers in the school district there were timid about teaching the subject, fearing it would offend the Ch…
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…nationalism dates back to the pilgrims, my series examines how features of today’s God-and-country ideology owe a particular debt to the obsessions that transfixed the popular culture of Britain in the 1890s: the supposed “hordes” of immigrants diluting the nation’s racial stock; melancholy over the putative “weakness” of a once-great nation; panic over non-straight public expressions of sexuality; a sci-fi tinged apocalypticism, in which heroes a…
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…estants (57%) and White Catholics (59%)—say that if the election were held today, they would vote for Trump. These levels of support from White Christians are virtually unchanged from 2016 and 2020. Like other successful authoritarian leaders, Trump has uncanny political instincts. Ever since he rose to power, his MAGA mantra has been conjuring a vision of an ethno-religious, White Christian state. His use of the phrase “poisoning the blood of our…
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…ening the hand of the poor and needy” is regarded as socialist anathema by today’s Tea Party zealots, the Tea Party has more in common with the Sodomites than do gays or lesbians. Likewise in text after text after text, Sodom’s wickedness is connected to cruelty, injustice, and deceit—never homosexuality. Jeremiah 23:14: I have seen also in the prophets of Jerusalem a horrible thing: they commit adultery, and walk in lies: they strengthen also the…
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…developed in the Americas during and after the Atlantic slave trade up to today. The class includes discussion of West African religions, the impact of the Atlantic slave trade, the role of politics, the construction of racial identities, and most importantly, the diversity of African American religions. But we don’t examine the diversity within African American religions just for the sake of religious variety. Within various forms of Christianit…
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…the strongest of human actions, often at terrible cost. Waiting For War Today is no different. For example, within the evangelical world—which, let’s remember, includes between 30% and 40% of all Americans—there is a split between postmillennialists, who believe that Christ’s peaceful reign on Earth will follow a gradual improvement in human life, and the more familiar premillennialists, who believe that Christ will suddenly come back, destroy…
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