Religion Dispatches
…new age credos like the power of positive thinking, and attainable middle class prosperity of the post-World War II era, the Word of Faith movement took hold in the 1950s followed by a doctrinal merger with televangelist Oral Roberts’ seed-faith theology in the 1960s. With the explosion of religious broadcasting in the 1970s, the result today is seen not only in the preaching of Hagee and Parsley, but also in most of the country’s leading televan…
Read More…aws would protect any religious persecution, since religion is a protected class under federal discrimination statutes. On the demagoguery side of the spectrum comes Buddy Smith, Executive Vice President of the American Family Association who asserted that kids can condemn homosexuality without being a bully: ”Activist adults essentially are saying that American parents who want their kids to avoid high risk homosexual sex acts and remain abstinen…
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…ntury and sought to provide protection for Jews who were treated as second-class citizens in both Christian Europe and Muslim countries for many hundreds of years. The desire for a safe haven made perfect sense, though the antagonism that they encountered from many Palestinians made perfect sense as well given the previous history of Western colonialism and Christian crusades. Palestinians saw the Jews as an invading force that would uproot their…
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…estioning the notion of scientific consensus. In his May 16 column for the American Enterprise Institute, Richards wrote: Anyone who has studied the history of science knows that scientists are not immune to the non-rational dynamics of the herd. Many false ideas enjoyed consensus opinion at one time. Indeed, the ‘power of the paradigm’ often shapes the thinking of scientists so strongly that they become unable to accurately summarize, let alone e…
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…onsequence; the bill should pass in order to cover the tens of millions of Americans who lack it. That would mean that gay marriage laws get passed not only unchallenged by the so-called centrists but supported by them, so that LGBTQ people (God’s children?) are no longer relegated to second-class citizenship. Anything less than that from the prophets of the end of the culture wars means that they are fighting them, or at the very least throwing f…
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…eing taught the book by a very serious, and highly imaginative, scholar of American literature. He did not let the class neglect the crucial detail, revealed near the book’s end, that our stalwart narrator has been confined to a sanitorium, and may not be quite the trustworthy reporter he would have us believe him to be. So the book was far more than a manifesto for the mid-teen audience horrified by the overwhelming influence of “phonies” in the…
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…ly few representations of mass locker searches or other abuses of power by American schools on television, so the moment in this week’s episode involving the locker search stood out to me. (It especially stood out given the news coverage this weekend of the Pennsylvania school which put spyware on computers issued to their students and which snooped on them outside school, without parental permission.) While “Gingerbread” in important ways prefigu…
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…ess) and the punk suffix “core,” Knight gave voice a segment of the Muslim-American community. He also earned the ire of large parts of the community who were in denial that these people existed, who felt their power threatened, or who could not deal with the confusion their decisions caused. Following is a roundtable discussion on the Taqwacore scene among Basim Usmani and Shahjehan Khan (both members of the band the Kominas), Kaitlin Foley (rad…
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…ith organized crime and with the distrust of their new government. It is a classic immigrant story, made all the more poignant by the contrast between the two brothers: one tattooed in ways which make it impossible for him to deny his own identity, while the other seeks to mask his identity, having adopted an assimilating name and demeanor. He refuses his mother-in-law’s suggestion that he take his son back to the world they came from, yet he’s co…
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…audience believing that God had a great deal of interest in helping middle-class Americans with their personal problems and conflicts, though He and His messengers seemed to spend little time dealing with war, famine, and social injustice. Feel-good angelmania suddenly appeared everywhere. The hugely popular Ask Your Angels (1992) told its readers that they were surrounded with heavenly helpers interested in providing “empowerment.” “Angel Tarot C…
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