Religion Dispatches
…of Americans losing compensated work for working poverty or worse, and concomitant big jumps in the number of people losing health care coverage. The thing is—and labor market specialists all concur—these blows are no longer cyclical phenomena that will be reversed once “the economy” really starts humming. “The economy,” in the way that mainstream economists gauge it, and the economic well-being of everyday people has parted company for good. Pol…
Read More
…rspective over all others, and which encouraged critical thinking, careful communication skills, and creativity. Twenty-eight districts had courses that reflected a combination of successful and unsuccessful elements, sometimes achieving a nonsectarian approach, but other times lapsing—sometimes considerably—into religious bias of the kinds noted by federal courts. The courses of twenty-one districts were thoroughly religious in nature, sometimes…
Read More
…rt of reminder that there have always been African Americans in the Jewish community. We also have a number of artifacts from the Nation of Islam as well as other Muslim communities. So the museum reminds us there were African Muslims who were enslaved, making the Islamic experience part of the founding of America. Even though black history is dominated by the Christian voice, it is not the only voice that is present. We strive to tell the story f…
Read More…decline isn’t the whole story. Even among weekly churchgoers, Trump still comes out ahead of his competitors. Evangelicals argue that at least part of that is due to the divided field where anti-Trump voters can choose from a number of alternatives. But that interpretation only underscores the larger point: Trump is still the one candidate who coalesces the largest number of evangelicals—even the weekly churchgoers—around him. Those numbers would…
Read More
…in eight high-poverty neighborhoods and surveyed 1,206 residents of low-income housing complexes adjacent to these congregations. Many of the congregations had small or moderate-sized memberships, with 17 percent of the congregations reporting memberships of less than 100 and 49 percent reporting memberships between 100 and 499. The membership of these congregations came mainly from outside the neighborhoods, with sixty percent of the congregatio…
Read More
…ulture warrior. At the end of the day Mr. Perkins is doing exactly what he complains the LGBT community is doing to his worldview and the justification that to act in such ways based on ‘the other’ acting in those same ways is not acceptable. It’s also a shame the Washington Post gave voice to someone trying to win a battle and tear down bridges, instead of building those bridges for the Kingdom. Reconciliation is a funny thing that takes shape in…
Read More
…the past few days I’ve seen a number of references to “America’s Birthday” coming up on Friday. If a commercial advertiser wants to say this, fine (I guess). But I have spotted a couple of otherwise sober-minded writers using the “birthday” tag as well, and their ignorance is more disturbing. July 4, 1776, was in no way the birthday of anything. It was the start of a long and savage struggle against the world’s most powerful empire at the time. If…
Read More
…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…
Read More…k Times showed his favorables to be extremely high in the African-American community, while he is losing traction with other groups who voted for him in 2008. Issues in the community surrounding foreclosures and unemployment are likely to continue. If the black church writ large is to have any stake in the 2012 election, it needs to be organized around issues that matter to it. Coalitions are more than just preachers and powerbrokers in individual…
Read More…21% of Gen Xers and 32% describing themselves as politically independent, compared to 37% of Gen Xers and 50% of the Silent Generation. Though a number of studies have found that young people were leaving the church because they saw them as intolerant places, it’s unlikely that the conservative religious actors behind the anti-gay rights law that just passed in Mississippi and the Hobby Lobby case realize that their actions are part of—and perhap…
Read More