Religion Dispatches
…ncome every year, but they own about 40 percent of the total wealth of the United States. Wealth in a democratic society creates enormous political power. In 1976, the wealthiest one percent of Americans received about seven percent of the nation’s annual income. By 2007, that figure had gone up to twenty-four percent going to the wealthiest one percent. How did that happen? Is it because the wealthiest worked really hard from 1976 to 2007 while t…
Read More
…n have gone unanswered. Over at the evangelical flagship site Christianity Today, Andy Crouch opined how the real problem here isn’t plagiarism but the fact that much of the work attributed to celebrity figures in the Christian world today is not their own. But the glaring fact remains that plagiarism is a very serious offense that in non-evangelical settings often results in loss of employment. Yes, in secular circles, author/speakers with star p…
Read More
…e conservative editorial policies of their flagship magazine, Christianity Today. It really ought to have some staffers who are free not to parrot the old shibboleths of evangelical political and social ethics, and who are more in tune with the values of centrist liberals. Currently they do little more than uphold knee-jerk Republican positions. The lack of serious political and theological diversity in the magazine’s treatment of current issues i…
Read More
…ughout his campaign, often more dramatically than he did with Christianity Today. Just last month, in an address at Liberty University, Carson inveighed against the secular progressives “who are trying to push God out of our lives.” “Let me tell you,” Carson continued, “our nation’s survival as the pinnacle nation in the world…is rooted in our values system, the values and principles that made us into a great nation. And the real question is: Are…
Read More
…long considered quintessential “outsiders” to mainstream American culture, today find themselves at the center of the American zeitgeist. Yet it is the Mormons’ supposed theological weirdness that is the centripetal attraction. As Joanna Brooks has noted in these pages, the New York Times recently featured Harold Bloom’s musings on how a President Romney would govern a country, and a planet, from which he would in the afterlife depart, becoming th…
Read More
…generation of my own children. “The primary issue in the Christian church today is to get away from original sin and to see the story of Jesus not as saving the sinful but as expanding their humanity.” Most of my controversy came from my fight for the rights of gays and lesbians. Once I was convinced of the holiness of gays and lesbians, I ordained the first openly gay man with a partner in 1989. That’s a long time ago in this battle. It was cove…
Read More…will judge us all very, very harshly. I think the people who vote for this today, and in the future… will on this issue, not be so proud and there may be some justifiable shame there as well.” The attempt to shame marriage equality opponents in the present is a sore point for people like Maggie Gallagher at the National Organization for Marriage who complained they are being painted as a “bigot who is opposed to interracial marriage.” The fact tha…
Read More…d-be Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, as noted in RD, has said her work in promoting school choice is fueled by her desire to “confront the culture in which we live today to help advance God’s Kingdom.” Allowing public education funding to go to religious schools is, according to some, the foundational issue of the Christian right. But it’s not just within the Trump administration where the Christian right will likely hold sway. The Christian righ…
Read More…ho has given away hundreds of millions of dollars to causes in Israel, the United States and Asia, Adelson—who has been there and done that—was nonetheless sufficiently emotional, when presented with a sculpture of Jerusalem, to wipe a tear from his eye. And speaking of tears, the best case scenario for Israeli news consumers: Adelson only spoke to American reporters so they had an alternative to the Jerusalem Post’s puff piece. Worst-case scenari…
Read More
…rsalism. This popular history underscores continuities between the work of today’s human rights defenders and previous citizens’ struggles for the rights of women, workers, immigrants, and formerly enslaved and colonized peoples, placing Malala Yousafzai shoulder to shoulder with Frederick Douglass and Mary Wollstonecraft. In Moyn’s narrative, human rights are no older than Generation X. The eighteenth century discourse of droits de l’homme or “ri…
Read More