Religion Dispatches
…nk of Steve Munsey, an Indiana prosperity preacher I watched in a Decatur, Georgia television studio in 2007, pleading for audience members and viewers to give their money to the Trinity Broadcasting Network. As it turns out, the story is about Munsey’s church, Family Christian Center, which claims to have a weekly attendance of 15,000, making it one of the largest churches in the country. According to an investigation by the NWITimes.com, a paper…
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…—and spurred self-reflection among those of us who do it. Gissendaner is a Georgia woman who was sentenced to death in 1998 for conspiring to murder her husband. She was scheduled to be executed in late February, but her execution was postponed because of bad weather. It was postponed again in early March because the lethal injection drugs appeared cloudy. While in prison, Ms. Gissendaner enrolled in a theological studies program for prisoners, wh…
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…in a way that makes them inextricable. Two cases, one in Texas and one in Georgia, have really put the death penalty back in the news. In Texas, the US Supreme Court just last week granted a stay of execution for a man who had already taken his last meal (fried chicken and catfish) despite Governor Perry’s repeated statements of his confidence in justice as administered by the State of Texas. The Supreme Court took a slightly different view of Te…
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…coming all year. Kandiss Taylor, the failed GOP gubernatorial candidate in Georgia best known for her “Jesus, Guns, Babies” campaign bus whose statements were relentlessly mocked and dismissed, declared at a campaign event in March: “We’re gonna do a political rally and we’re gonna honor Jesus. They’re not gonna tell us ‘separation of church and state.’ We are the church! We run this state!” Now, Taylor lost, and lost badly, which made it easy to…
Read More…hool has a say. Most recently, it was State Representative Judy Manning of Georgia who told the Marietta Daily Journal last week that “I think Mitt Romney is a nice man, but I’m afraid of his Mormon faith. It’s better than a Muslim. Of course, every time you look at the TV these days you find an ad on there telling us how normal they are. So why do they have to put ads on the the TV just to convince us that they’re normal if they are normal?… If t…
Read More…exual, or transgender, understands that there is Atlanta and then there is Georgia. In Atlanta, especially in places like Midtown, walking around holding your partner’s hand was relatively safe. You may get someone making a hateful comment as they drive by, but by and large, no one gave you a second glance. Where my partner and I lived however was not Midtown Atlanta, even though it was the hamlet made famous in the film adaptation of Fannie Flagg…
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…ell, we got this land in the 1820s via this land lottery that the state of Georgia was performing. And then, you know, we set up a shop there. It was on my mother’s side of the family. There was evidence [among them] of people who were not the kind of wealthy planter class. But, they still enslaved other people, even as a kind of lower class subsistence farmer. But what I didn’t ever push back on was where did that land come from that was suddenly…
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…age boy waiting in line behind me at the Tribulation Trail in Stockbridge, Georgia. His mother brushed off the question: “It’s only scary if you don’t accept Jesus.” But at Tribulation Trail fear was a theme from beginning to end. And if it wasn’t a traumatic experience for this child, it probably should have been. For many right-wing evangelical Christians, Halloween season is defined not by haunted houses, but by hell houses. Why scare people wi…
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…eth Parcell? He’s a flyover state native too, hailing from Stone Mountain, Georgia. He attended a Bible college. (He’s hundreds of years old.) Does his optimism, cheerfulness, and desire to do his best belong to a lost past as well—along with Kimmy’s cassette tapes, the 90s, Indiana, Georgia, scrunchies, and preachers named Gary? In The Future of Nostalgia Svetlana Boym discusses the remarkable etymology of the word “nostalgia.” It looks like it m…
Read More…, when a federal judge in Wisconsin found the relevant portions of the tax code to be unconstitutional, but the three judges on the appellate panel did not tip their hand, although they showed few outward signs that they agreed. The regulation at issue is more than sixty years old, enacted in the 1950s to ensure that ministers at churches who could not afford to provide them with housing could nevertheless benefit from the same tax breaks as minis…
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