Religion Dispatches
…Christians these days have moved on from Niebuhr, who after all ended his run chastising Civil Rights leaders for moving too fast, and supporting Mutually Assured Destruction and the Vietnam War. Most people these days look to Juergen Moltmann (even he’s kind of old-school by now), Gustavo Gutierrez, Marcus Borg, James Cone, Sallie McFague, or any number of other thinkers and theologians that Douthat does not recognize. The only people who want t…
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…tten by Emma Graham-Harrison] with whistleblower Chris Wylie broke and the headlines just rolled across the world. I followed the committee for a year. They went to America, the first committee to ever do so, to interview Google, Twitter, Facebook. And as these tech companies lied, and they lied some more, it became a very interesting story. Then it turned out that there was very little will in the UK to pursue any of the regulation that the commi…
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…an example covered in the report. And, through their court packing under Trump and legislative initiatives like those developed by the Christian Nationalist initiative Project Blitz, America’s conservative Christians are working overtime to keep lack of religion stigmatized. Citing Christian Right attempts to have “In God We Trust” posted in public school classrooms and similar efforts, “The Tipping Point Generation” notes, “It is increasingly cl…
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…y did not make any officials available for interview, and Mary Voytek, who runs the Astrobiology Program, did not respond to an interview request). Since 1998, part of the Astrobiology Program’s role has been to address the societal implications of the field, mostly through a series of initiatives at the Library of Congress (although there’s also an astrobiology-themed, NASA-funded student debate competition. Most recent topic: “Resolved: An overr…
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…ith current Vice President Mike Pence serving as commander-in-chief after Trump gets his head stuck in a honey jar. (Hey, as Minhaj noted at the other dinner, anything’s possible in Trump’s America, right?) The segment aired at the end of the night and wrapped a multi-part feature imagining Bee roasting several former presidents in period-appropriate attire. The “2018” clip depicts a modern American theocracy, where women must request “a rare exce…
Read More…groups “have little or no independent influence.” Although the breathless headlines suggest otherwise, the authors never baldly state that the U.S. is run by an oligarchy. Instead they believe that the study supports the related theories of Economic Elite Domination, which means (obviously) that the rich folks run the show, and Biased Pluralism, wherein interest groups—especially business groups—have the most influence. The lowdown is that Americ…
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…eshua (Jesus) as their messiah, anticipating Jesus’ return to Jerusalem to rule the world from the Temple Mount. I don’t think many Israelis have popped in, as I did, at a prayer meeting on Jaffa Street in Jersusalem where there was prayer to “cleanse” and “purify” Jerusalem, and for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept Jesus as the Messiah. Messianic Jews are claiming Bush’s appearance at their group is proof that they are becoming mainstr…
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…session’s scheduled six o’clock start, maintenance crews parked a garbage truck between the line of waiting women and the Tabernacle door. “I thought it was strange to have a truck weaving in and out of the traffic on Temple Square during Conference,” said Ordain Women participant Heather Olsen Beal of Nacogdoches, Texas. When the truck pulled away, a church official had drawn a barrier across the Tabernacle doors. Participants returned to a loc…
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…they figure out (read: discern) their way. What remains to be seen is if structural changes in the institutional church, inclusive forms of participation—yes, democracy—will flow from his words. There is a logical contradiction in imposing a new model, even a democratic one, from on high. Will Francis be as good a theo-politician as he is a pastor? It will take some doing to transform without repeating the autocratic ways of the past. One can only…
Read More…s a way of once again gearing up for a not-too-distant future presidential run, Palin also waded into foreign policy, specifically focusing her ire on the Obama administration’s supposedly benign attitude and lax policies towards “our enemies,” those “who would utterly annihilate America.” Palin’s remarks were, not surprisingly, on the generic side, but she clearly has so-called enhanced interrogation techniques—i.e. torture—in mind. Rather than “…
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