Religion Dispatches
…owns over abortion, health care, and budgets suggest that conditions seem not to have changed. Perhaps renewed attention to the more flexible and civil politics of an earlier era can offer a way out of today’s angry brinksmanship….
Read More
…o help us realize that while we may believe that civility is important, in politics, as in life, it must not be allowed to displace a party’s fidelity to its ideals. Integrity and fortitude are crucial if a party is to engage in principled compromises—rather than to simply be compromised. When the latter happens, a party often undergoes something akin to an identity crisis. While it certainly wasn’t spurred on by an avalanche of compromise, the Re…
Read More…ged by the seemingly ubiquitous nature of injustice. This is particularly true among middle-class African Americans in the south side of Chicago. For those who have played by the social rules yet still feel alienated, angered, and victimized by racial disparities within the health, educational, economic, and criminal justice systems, Dr. Wright lets them know that they are not crazy. And while many (like Senator Barack Obama) may reject the politi…
Read MoreCall it a changing of the guard in Mormon politics on immigration: goodbye Russell Pearce, the LDS Arizona state senator who authored that state’s controversial SB 1070, and hello Raul Labrador, a Republican congressman from Idaho’s first congressional district who has played an influential role in the development of the bipartisan immigration reform bill scheduled to be unveiled Tuesday. In an editorial last week in the Idaho Statesman, the Puer…
Read More
…he Middle East were, and of how they had destroyed basic human dignity. As news of Bouazizi’s fate spread across Tunisia, demonstrators protesting social injustice, corruption, unemployment, and political repression organized in such numbers that Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled the country on 14 January 2011, effectively ending 23 years of his presidency. During this time, protests spread to Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Jordan. The impact…
Read More
…husband, Sergey. As well as yoga and raw food, she was interested in 9/11 truther theories, once running a public access TV show Uncensored 9/11, which she presented naked. In her subsequent show My Naked TV, no longer on public access, she and a guest would talk for half an hour naked, about almost anything. (There’s also a website, in which Taub leaves her own digital trail of blog posts.) Despite the media focus on the connection between Taub a…
Read More
…wer to the question. During the 75 years he lived, he embodied the noble struggle of bringing piety and politics together. My father was a Baptist pastor in Virginia for more than 45 years. He was deeply committed to Jesus and to civic engagement and social justice. On most Sundays during my childhood, my father passionately preached to a warm congregation of earnest Black people in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia. Yet I have equall…
Read More
…for better or worse, parroted a right-wing approximation of Jewish-Israeli politics, replete with the crude stereotyping, fearmongering, and incitement that are the hallmarks of right-wing rhetoric in Israel. But, along with the usual gestures toward peace in the Middle East, we also saw a remarkably high number of attacks on Islam, on Iran, and on Arab Americans. There was the Republican outing of Barack Obama as a ‘secret Muslim’ and the promoti…
Read More
…maybe it’s not just more candidate bullshit, that this guy it’s maybe the truth. Or maybe both the truth and bullshit—the man does want your vote, after all. The man does want your vote, after all. And so we return to where we begin. How do we ever know the mysteries of the man’s soul? And what, really, should those mysteries have to do with our political estimations? To declare that McCain is not Christian against his (once rare; now constant) pr…
Read More
…y, Obama made history not by introducing liberationist ideas into American politics, as readers of Obama’s 2006 campaign book “Audacity of Hope” might have, well, hoped, but by reviving the Social Gospel’s cautious optimism. That’s no small feat in a country where “liberalism” is considered next to “socialism,” the devil’s own doctrine. But it’s quite a bit smaller than what Obama set out to do. Obama wanted to transform politics. Instead, he has…
Read More