Religion Dispatches
…r him was to reject the notion of a God who guides history. Sometime in the 1980s, I was leaving a restaurant with Rubenstein when he said quite casually that the Jewish people had rejected his theological view and they were right to do so. Before I could ask him why they were right, he headed off in another direction and I never saw him again. But he was surely right on one point. As Rabbi David Saperstein noted in the Washington Post (in his own…
Read More
…ximates the vote-getting heft of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority of the late 1970s and 1980s and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition of the late 1980s and 1990s)—except that CUFI is based around one closely-related raft of goals which, as journalist Max Blumenthal has crisply put it, called for “an expansion of Israel and a unilateral military attack on Iran.” The video, which was more of a collage than a documentary, featured no narrative voice at…
Read More
…e by peaceful means, not by violence. Gandhi’s opposition to Zionism in the 1920s and ’30s did not preclude support for the rights of Jews in Europe, however. In 1931, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, one of America’s most prominent Reform Rabbis and a leader of the Zionist Organization of America, was invited to address the Friends of Gandhi Dinner in New York City on the occasion of the Mahatma’s Sixty-second birthday. Rabbi Wise, who had long admired Gan…
Read More
…or a Suburban. Yet McCain supplies no wake-up call, no re-awakening of his spirit to explicate his substitution of Sunday affections. He offers no specifications of the kind of Christ that pressed him from a the Book of Common Prayer to the Baptist Faith and Message. Nor, as mentioned above, has he shown the increased piety of the convert. When asked how often he attends church McCain says, “not as often as I should.” When asked whether he has par…
Read More…on and her small town roots is the way they seem to merge, the territorial spiritual warfare of her churches phrased in secular terms through her channeling of Pegler. “Territorial spiritual warfare” is the idea, embraced by Palin’s pastors, that entire cities can be possessed by demons. Small towns, too, theoretically, but that’s not usually how it works. The first time I encountered it was at Ted Haggard’s New Life Church, in Colorado Springs. W…
Read More…nections and theological applications.” Detweiler, co-director of the Reel Spirituality Institute and associate professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, “uses the IMDb, the wildly popular Internet Movie Database, to select today’s most influential contemporary films. Into the Dark dissects the theology of everyday life, exploring the work of the Spirit of God in creation and redemption to discuss “general revelation” throu…
Read More
…megachurch pastor comes from a long line of Southern Baptist preachers. In 1980 he began the Saddleback Church with a tiny congregation who brought lawn chairs to basement meetings. His obvious talents and experimental programs led the church to grow exponentially. Today it has 22,000 members and operates from a large campus in Lake Forest, California, which includes a middle school and high school with an enrollment of 1500. These accomplishment…
Read More…g first-time voters, who make up close to one-third of this age group (ages 18-34), more than seven-in-ten (71%) support Obama, compared to slightly more than half (53%) of young voters who have voted in previous elections. Younger Catholics more strongly support Obama, abortion rights, and more active government than older Catholics. While older Catholics (age 35 and older) are split between the candidates (46% for McCain and 44% for Obama), amon…
Read More
…dimensional mask, while they were invited to reenact select events from the 1993 violence at the Waco compound that ended the lives of more than 70 people. According to the Eddo Stern’s Web site, gamers “enter the mind and form of a resurrected David Koresh,” and enter the game’s network “as a Koresh [who] must defend the Branch Davidian compound against internal intrigue, skeptical civilians, rival Koresh, and the inexorable advance of government…
Read More
…nding of “World AIDS Day.” The illness that was both unknown and unnamed in 1981 has since been labeled “wrath of God” syndrome, gay-related immune deficiency syndrome, and, eventually, acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Today, more than fifty percent of those with AIDS globally are women; and the syndrome is the leading cause of death among African American women between 25 and 34. Now, in 2008, nearly fifty percent of new U.S. diagnoses of HIV…
Read More