Religion Dispatches
…uman experience. So here, without further preamble, RD’s picks for the Ten Best of 2008’s Religion Top Ten lists. 1.) By now, everyone has seen TIME MAGAZINE’S TOP TEN RELIGION STORIES FOR 2008 by the wise and learned Dave Van Biema. The top story, per Van Biema, is the fact that we’re all going to the poorhouse. In other words the top religion story is that it was not religion, in the end, that decided the presidential election. (Patting ourselve…
Read More…understand that these measures will be met with some resistance and that a number of taboos related to the topic still persist,” he wrote, “However, as President, it is my duty to ensure that the personal beliefs and customs of some do not limit the human rights of others.” Part of the resistance to marriage equality in Mexico comes from the Catholic Church and other religious leaders. This week KUTV in Salt Lake City reported that Mormon Church o…
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…uing a host of Obama missteps including complaints about the reversal of a number of Bush administration executive orders. Conservative evangelical leaders will engage in a spirited and steadfast attempt to rebuild and reinvigorate a wounded movement, leading to the US Postal Service and direct-mail companies experiencing a surge in business as urgent fundraising appeals pepper the mailboxes and inboxes of religious right supporters. At its worst—…
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…hority, and Whites-only citizenship rights. For this wing of the movement, best exemplified in my book by a now-deceased Washington Times columnist Sam Francis, opposition to abortion is less a theological imperative and more a program plank alongside support for gun rights and opposition to immigration. Then there are the so-called Christian patriots and Posse Comitatus-types for whom a specific theological strain known as “Christian Identity” de…
Read More…d still more resources into the fight—ultimately paying a relatively small number of strikers the then-unheard-of sum of $12 million in union strike benefits. The union had won an overwhelming victory. But within a decade Kohler was shipping the work to new non-union facilities in the South. Just last year the current magnate—yet another Herbert Kohler—pushed through a greatly weakened contract for the small number of Local 833 members still emplo…
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…inant models of analysis: number crunching and psychology. Greenspan was a number cruncher, says Brooks, and unfortunately, human psychology caught up with him. Greenspan saw real estate values continuing to soar with no end in sight and allowed himself to be persuaded that they would never stop rising, and certainly would never fall. So he never had to think about petty psychological realities, like a crisis of confidence, never mind an actual pa…
Read More…groups on Israeli-Palestinian issues. In addition, he was the author of a number of books, the latest of which urged the United States to get muscular with Iran. In February, after being courted by Team McCain for more than in year, Hagee endorsed Sen. John McCain for the presidency. Then Talk2Action’s Bruce Wilson got busy. He delved into the pastor’s sermons, his writing and public commentaries. Wilson found that Hagee’s sermons were riddled wi…
Read More…learning from our colleagues and exploring these complex histories over a number of years, we have found that religious liberty is not a single, stable principle existing outside of history, as it is often depicted (particularly in policy circles in North America and Europe and by many academics invested in promoting religious freedom). It is, rather, an inescapably context-bound, polyvalent concept unfolding within divergent histories in differi…
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…sippi Clarion Ledger reported earlier this year that the overall growth in number of interracial couples in Mississippi was behind the national average (less than 2.4 percentage points in Mississippi compared to 2.8 percentage points nationally). According to a report released by Pew Research Center in 2017, only 9% of Americans say that interracial marriage is “a bad thing,” while 17% of respondents to a 2018 YouGov poll said that interracial mar…
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…g his recent visit to Jamaica, and includes specific recommendations for a number of U.S. agencies to engage in effective partnership with Jamaican government officials and cooperation with human rights advocates in civil society. Also this week, the State Department confirmed plans for Randy Berry, recently appointed special envoy for LGBT rights, to visit Uganda this summer after trips to the Caribbean, Latin America and Europe. Watch a set of v…
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