Religion Dispatches
…rew Brees calls home and it’s from this perspective that I say Drew Brees’ comments were right. His comments were right not only because he spoke from his heart but because his comments, especially given the fact that they were made in the midst of everything that’s going on in our country, reveal what most white people believe in their hearts. In a well known speech from 1963, Malcom X explained why he believed that white liberals, who, “[sell] t…
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…ican crusader against homosexuality”—and particularly since he said he had come “to thank the Russian people, the State Duma, and President Putin… in the name of the entire Christian world.” To thank them, that is, for their uncompromising stance against same-sex relations which, in Cameron’s fact-free worldview, are destroying Western civilization. On Tuesday, Cameron took part in a conference hosted by the news organization Moskovsky Komsomolets…
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…tectionism, and “criminal” immigrants, over the last few years Trump has become visibly more comfortable using language that more directly appeals to the conservative, mostly white evangelicals and radical traditionalist Catholics who represent his base, and with whom he has surrounded himself. To those with “eyes to see,” Trump’s first clear appeal to the Christian Right came in his use of the phrase “failing government schools” in the midst of h…
Read More…to be outdone, Stephen Colbert appeared from the wings announcing his own competing rally: “The March to Keep Fear Alive.” For his part Colbert promises to “restore truthiness” but its pretty clear his goal is to out-do his arch rival Stewart. The whole scene was repeated on Colbert’s show where Stewart did his own walk-on while Colbert was extolling fear. “Now is not the time to take it down a notch; now is the time to freak out for freedom!”…
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…experiencing an abortion is more traumatic than experiencing rape, an idea commonly found in the new evangelical “compassion-oriented” prolife discourse. Novels like The Atonement Child circulate medical “knowledge,” part of the worldview that makes evangelicals so supportive of President Trump’s Supreme Court picks. Evangelicals have particular ways of reading, often based in their understanding of the Bible. Ken Paradis looks at the use of “typo…
Read More…Mormons, Hollywood liberals, Canadians, Satan, Christ, physically disabled comedians. So for its 200th episode last week, South Park creators took on the Muslim belief that depicting the image of the prophet Muhammad is blasphemous. They show the prophet dressed in a football mascot bear suit as other South Park characters worry about being bombed by terrorists. Now, a Web site called Revolutionmuslim.com has issued a threat against the South Park…
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…s dangerous and liable measures. However, we are “realists.” The Christian community is at risk from all these things and as a whole is behind the curve compared to the secular world in terms of security and emergency preparedness. These situations will occur in the Christian church, in the Christian school, at the Christian ministry, and against Christian missionaries. Jim Hamilton, a senior writer for Neighbor Newspapers, recently pointed out th…
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…h God; and this, too, at a time when he may be said to have been guilty of compelling his woman slave to commit the sin of adultery.” In Douglass’s view, Christian slaveholders were often as much subjects of self-deception as they were self-conscious frauds. Douglass’s Christian slavers were the ancestors, in theology and church tradition, if not in actual family genealogy, of today’s Christian Right. Although the popular tale of the political emp…
Read More…fornia Supreme Court, Andrew Pugno, general counsel of the ProtectMarriage.com coalition said: “This gives the state Supreme Court an opportunity to clearly reaffirm the right of official proponents to legally defend voter-passed initiatives they successfully enact, particularly when public officials abdicate their constitutional duties by refusing to enforce and defend the law.” But Jennifer C. Pizer, National Marriage Project Director for Lambda…
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…elopments, Cardinal Pell, has a page on Xt3.com, and invites Catholics to “come online and become one of my friends.” This year’s World Youth Day also included a new feature, a “digital prayer wall,” to which participants could text-message from their cell phones and post their requests for others to pray with them in public view. GodTube, a non-denominational Christian answer to YouTube, also includes a digital prayer wall, available online at an…
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