Religion Dispatches
…y move, my work has convinced me that we can’t understand what it means to help newcomers become Americans without looking at how immigrants maintain ties to their homelands at the same time. While migrants and non-migrants are separated by physical distance, they often continue to inhabit the same social space. The fate of those who move and those who stay behind are inextricably linked. In my first book, The Transnational Villagers, I wrote abou…
Read More…ity crusaders—Obamacare and Planned Parenthood—are programs that serve and help low-income people of color to a disproportionate degree. Ditto for Medicaid, already badly cut in successful budget rounds and now on tap for yet more cuts and possible block-granting. And the “universal” entitlement programs that remain the big prize in the budget cutters’ long war on domestic spending–Social Security and Medicare? Well, the fact is that low-income pe…
Read More
…home in a dangerous and faraway land fits the image—as does Jennifer (with help from friends and family) boosting her husband’s Art of Manliness-Man of the Year campaign on her Web site Ladies against Feminism and on various homeschooling blogs. Doing Demographic Battle with Nonbelievers When Doug Phillips blogged Chancey’s award campaign in the final 48 hours—he noted the large families of various other campaigners. Matt and Jennifer Chancey them…
Read More…share them with other people in the world, not by conquering them, but by helping them through our trade, through our various forms of soft power, to help bring people the joy and — and — and opportunity that exists in this great land. Compare that to an answer he gave in an October 2011 debate, during the height of the firestorm over Pastor Robert Jeffress’s “cult” comments. The moderator had asked whether voters should care about a candidate’s…
Read More
…ows it has to come through the Protestant majority: Catholics and Jews can help in all sorts of ways, but without protestantism it’s just not going to happen. Wilson responded to Hazony’s call for an end to Protestant infighting with a warning that, while Protestant denominations work together on small initiatives such as soup kitchens, there’s a sinister side in that this cooperation: “that turns into liberalism.” To Wilson’s questions, “what is…
Read More
…he ways in which people were deprived of rights, and we collected money to help them. We learned about the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. And we learned about what kinds of things people were doing to change the world. During that summer of 1968 I think I even performed in a play like the one the children of Knoxville did. I didn’t know then that I was a part of something larger called liberalism. I didn’t know then th…
Read More
…co-starred as a charismatic leader who has returned from the year 2054 to help those in need get by. There’s a Blair Witch feeling to it as the two investigators begin with the premise that the followers—the “real” followers, not them—are weak “suckers” looking for meaning, and are willing to be led into strange basements. Vulnerabilities break out all around as the strong and the weak, the suckers and the sucker-punchers, become difficult to sep…
Read More
…he wasn’t a sheep. Vitsmun will be remembered—at least in the atheist moment—as the moment when the world has to face the fact we’re not this tiny percentage of people. I don’t think the numbers are growing. I think the numbers are now being counted right. Atheists aren’t afraid anymore to speak out.” But what will Wolf do next time?…
Read More
…to the problems that plague us. The “mindfulness movement” may promise to “help us personally,” but it has “nothing to say on the structural difficulties that we live with. It lets go of the idea that we can change the world; it merely helps us function better in it.” That’s why the type of spirituality that such practices foster fit so easily with corporate culture, and can even contribute to a kind of “spiritual meritocracy,” as Shawn van Valken…
Read More…ed plans to hold a ritual over his gravesite that would posthumously make Phelps gay. Last year, Greaves travelled to Mississippi and performed a similar “pink mass” over the grave of Phelps’s mother. Local police vowed to charge Greaves with grave desecration, but no arrests were made. APRIL In April, the Satanic Temple announced its “Protect Children Project,” which opposes the use of corporal punishment in schools. It encouraged students to ass…
Read More