Religion Dispatches
…lance. There seems to be a fundamental difference between a citizen and/or organization withholding taxes for state services with which they do not wish to be identified, and a citizen and/or organization being asked to provide those services themselves. The problem is that this creates a false distinction between the state as an actor and people as actors. State services are, all of them, provided by organizations and by people. Catholic institut…
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…that followed) captured the righteous indignation of Mormons for whom stay-at-home motherhood is viewed as a sacred responsibility. Over the last several decades, statements by LDS Church leaders have presented nurturing children is an essential and divinely-established role for women. In 1987, Church President Ezra Taft Benson spoke “To The Mothers in Zion,” an address heard by many Mormon women as a call to leave the workplace and come home to…
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…f his retirement savings, well over a half-million dollars, taking out full-page newspaper ads and buying an RV that he had custom-painted with doomsday warnings. Even when I pressed, he wasn’t willing to admit any doubts about whether October 21 would really, finally, be it. “How can you say that when you see that all this beautiful information is in the Bible?” he asked me, his voice rising. “How can everything we’ve learned be a lie?” “I Was Pa…
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…on various national scales, and California’s once-vaunted high-quality, low-cost public higher education system has been almost entirely trashed. This chart (courtesy of Prof. Manuel Pastor, director of USC’s peerless Program for Environmental and Regional Equity) shows how non-Hispanic whites from throughout the entire United States will soon be following those from the Golden State into minority status; it may take another 30 years for the whol…
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…book is only half a volume, for it consciously does not deal with the best-known forms of millennialism: Christian and Jewish ones. This is like writing about soft drinks without mentioning Coca Cola. Yet the dozen cases Landes studies in depth, ranging from the 1856 Xhosa Cattle-Slaying to Marxism and Global Jihad, offer a series of mirrors through which to see more familiar religious and secular movements alike. It’s easy to say that millennial…
Read More…n in 1996, Pratt defended himself against charges of his connections to neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic groups by touting his membership in the Jews for the Preservation of Gun Ownership, a far-right group which claims — you guessed it — that gun control led to the Holocaust: I am a member of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. The leader of that organization, Aaron Zelman, just recently issued a statement saying that JPFO and Gun Owners of…
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…fers to the Bible as “Pro God content”: We must protect content that is pro-God. We love God. And we have to protect anything that is pro-God… I’m proud to endorse and encourage you to get this Bible. We must make America pray again! Given the almost unfathomable legal bills and fines he’s facing, this latest tawdry scheme is unlikely to make much of a dent (though he will, despite a carefully worded suggestion to the contrary, earn a cut of the p…
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