Religion Dispatches
…istan. During the campaign, he has called for an increase of a hundred thousand troops, which would double the number presently there. Yet it will still be half of the numbers of Russian troops that the former Soviet Union had deployed in Afghanistan—and it lost the war, dragging much of the Soviet economy down with it. A similarly dismal prognosis is in store for America’s continuing presence in Afghanistan. Moreover, the persistence of US troops…
Read MoreAccording to new census figures, the number of people reporting that they are living with a same-sex partner has risen 52 percent in the last decade. That’s almost 902,000 people who are living all across the United States. Even here in my own incredibly conservative state of South Carolina, the number of same-sex couples increased and a quarter of them are raising children. It’s those kinds of facts that have right-wing media like the Christian…
Read More…unter such statements implies approval; its hide-and-seek game essentially sanctions the persecution of sexual minorities in Africa and other parts of the world. Here at RD, Mary Hunt asked whether Ireland really “buried” the Catholic Church, writing, “Many people think the vote heralds the end of the Roman Catholic Church as we know it—but I think the reality might be more complicated.” We do know for sure that good Irish Catholics followed their…
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…unted Warehouse.) The news of R.A. Montgomery’s death at 78 was met with a number of tributes and appreciations on the Internet. These books were huge in the lives of many American children and have even been seen as presaging the cultural shift to the Internet age, where audiences are no longer happy to passively consume content, but want interaction. The history of the books is intertwined with the history of the Internet. There’s also a somewha…
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…de against Albanian Kosovars in the late 1990s. The fact is, a significant number of Serbs, and even a large number of others from traditionally Orthodox backgrounds, continue to harbor a great deal of anger about Western intervention in the Kosovo War, which they see as a failure by the West to comprehend the historical role-reversal that’s taken place, including the persecution of Orthodox Christians by Albanians and other majority-Muslim ethnic…
Read More…e for their unwillingness to put their reassurances in writing, proposed a number of amendments. So did other legislators, such that by the time SB-1433 was scheduled to be voted on, it was groaning under the weight of amendments. But the real turnaround came when Speaker Steele proposed an amendment to an amendment that, in essence, would have given teeth to the reassurances that the Oklahoma bill would do no more than the Missouri language. Tha…
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…-majority countries increased. Islam is part of the religious fabric of America. Islam is American. Yet, with a stroke of a pen, Donald Trump made Islam a foreign threat needing extreme “vetting.” Donald Trump and ISIS agree on this. It’s probably why ISIS celebrated Trump’s victory. For ISIS to thrive, it is essential to provoke America into a civilizational conflict. ISIS is, at best, a regional threat, but it has global aspirations. Through the…
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…obvious: Traditional believers are happier, healthier, and a heck of a lot saner. So there! Not so fast. Like all research, the BJP study bears much closer scrutiny and, as its authors note, the relationship between religion and mental health—as with religion and happiness or religion and physical health—requires much deeper examination. (A very brief primer on the evaluation of empirical data might be in order at this point, but I’ll spare the re…
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…llowing such a line of reasoning might mean we are seeing an uptick in the number of American’s who will report a life-changing Christian experience while simultaneously being less likely to identify with any particular Christian institution. This raises questions about the complicated relationship between Americans and their willingness to affiliate with large institutions (religious and otherwise) in general. The rate of decline in affiliation f…
Read More…l talk about the deeper roots of these things or attempt to explain why American culture is “exceptional”—exceptional in its toxicity, that is. A growing number of truth telling historians are eager to help us discover these deeper roots if we are willing to listen. Here I’m thinking mainly of scholars like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Gerald Horne who focus on the connections between settler colonialism, white supremacy, and an unparalleled level of…
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