Religion Dispatches
…ergy are not trained in any seminary, but are raised up from the congregation and recognized for their “call.” They also get it from organizations like Focus on the Family that reaches more than 220 million people in 155 nations (according to Focus’ own numbers) through their radio shows, email alerts, publications, and other materials. It’s groups like Focus on the Family that drive the anti-gay machine. In 2008, FotF…
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…ked the roots of the movement to the African Independent Church Movement in 1900, the Chinese House Church Movement beginning in 1976, and the U.S. Independent Charismatic Movement and the Latin American Grassroots Church Movement of the 1970s. As for the lineage of his version of dominion theology, it is decidedly Reformed as he traced it “back through R.J. Rushdoony and Abraham Kuyper to John Calvin.” Wagner’s “dominion theology” is essentially…
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…those who didn’t. And now we know just how divided the country is, in hard numbers. For five years, as part of a study whose results could not be more timely, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild traveled the bayous of southern Louisiana, meeting with Tea Party conservatives and trying to understand their thinking about life, hope, faith, and American politics. Her book, Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, tells…
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…l season did. But times have changed, in New Orleans and nationwide, since 1964—and while organizations like the ADL continue to monitor self-declared anti-Semitism, numbers are down in the long term. The advance of social acceptance of Jews into American culture has perhaps been aided by the ability and willingness of many American Jews to blend in. No one has to know you are Jewish if you Anglify your last name, stop speaking Yiddish, stop wear…
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…lobal conservative movement in response to international conferences in the 1990s, particularly concerning reproductive or women’s rights, which they feared could affect US law back home. At the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development, Pope John Paul II (an early bridge-builder who’d allied himself with Billy Graham and Campus Crusade for Christ in the 1970s) called for interfaith opposition to the conference’s draft program of action…
Read More…ce, the latter two of which sometimes include scanty clothing. People can hear performers like Rihanna or Gwen Stefani sing any time if they buy her CD or mp3s, but they pay to see her wear crazy getups and do complicated dance numbers. Whatever. Rihanna will cover up, and if Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera wants to perform in Malaysia, they’ll cover up, too. While I don’t care for the rule, the media attention on it seems misguided and sensa…
Read More…not seem very sound. Neither does the argument that “there is one person of 10 million who hates me, so they all must.” One also sees attacks on Pres. Obama for wanting to treat Muslims with respect. While it is true that treating Muslims with respect will not stop terrorism, it undercuts one of the major arguments that these terrorists groups have: non-Muslims do not treat Muslims with respect. There is an adage I grew up with in my Muslim househ…
Read More…tors contributing to male infertility in the West—with its ever decreasing numbers of spermatozoa in men—is environmental pollution caused by the byproducts of the pill. Some scientists have taken issue with the reports’ findings. Gianbenedetto Melis, vice-president of a contraceptive research association stated, “Once metabolized, the hormones contained in oral contraceptives no longer have any of the characteristic effects of feminine hormones.”…
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…erest of presidential authority. Ironically, the most openly religious American President of all time has inflicted the worst kinds of sacrilege on the body politic, and utterly underestimated the spiritual demands of growing numbers of Americans who are beginning to question his authority to shape how we remember the individual bodies who died under his command….
Read More…highway near the Maryland–D.C. border. The 40-foot Peace Cross, erected in 1925, is falling into disrepair, and when the local government set aside $100,000 for its renovation, the American Humanist Association sued, arguing that public funding for the memorial is unconstitutional because the memorial inherently endorses Christianity above other religions. Arguments are scheduled for late February, and at least one similar case, from Pensacola, F…
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