Religion Dispatches
…ge into 10 distinct churches, yet the state’s Department of Corrections handbook has no distinct listing for Eastern Orthodoxy. Glenn has been in prison since 1992, when he was convicted of sexually molesting a 9-year-old and a 15-year-old boy, making it very unlikely that his case will be championed by religious liberty advocates. In any case, the court is scheduled to move forward with the case in December….
Read More…be called the cold war era’s David Barton, is author of The 5000 Thousand Year Leap. Given renewed popularity by Glenn Beck over the last year or so, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz characterizes it as “a treatise that assembles selective quotations and groundless assertions to claim that the US Constitution is rooted not in the Enlightenment but in the Bible.” NCCS has sought to promote their materials through public institutions before and it…
Read More…s them especially vulnerable,” but most will still “have to wait about two years for a ticket out of Turkey.” But to an individual, those two years can feel like an eternity. Refugees are generally barred from working and often survive doing back-breaking black-market labor or sex work. One sign of how at risk they feel is that all of those who spoke to BuzzFeed News for this story asked to be identified by their first names or nicknames. Many — e…
Read More…inter’s crocuses, the Academic Freedom bills are beginning to sprout. Each year, various conservative state lawmakers across the country flock back from vacation to their new legislative session clutching slightly tweaked versions of these bills. The title “Academic Freedom” sounds noble enough (how could a freedom-loving American oppose such a thing?) but the bills’ basic gist is this: “Evolution is a lie! Evolution is evil! If your children lear…
Read More…deral outlays. (The last year in which federal outlays were lower than the year before was 1965, when Democrats ran both the White House and Congress.) As soon as Republicans controlled both Congress and the White House in 2001, spending really took off, with more than $100 billion added to federal outlays every year that Bush sat in the White House (considerably more than either Bill Clinton or Bush 41). Spending is what Republicans do best, and…
Read More…erized much of the debate around abortion in America. In 1985, following a year during which there were 10 bombings and 16 cases of arson, the senior Scheidler famously called for “a year of pain and fear.” For over a decade he was a named defendant in the high-profile case, Scheidler v. NOW, in which the National Organization for Women argued that Scheidler and others effectively formed a criminal conspiracy to close clinics that provided abortio…
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…American religion’s entanglement with conservative politics. Earlier this year, PRRI offered statistics for the intersection of Q-belief and religion, noting that white evangelicals, Hispanic evangelicals, and Mormons are most likely to believe the ideas espoused by Q. This includes 21% of Mormons who believe in QAnon, and 18% who specifically believe that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan…
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…convention. Second, he brokered a deal with another viable candidate this year to replace the latter’s name on the ballot and garner support. And once he saw this political ploy as less than viable in terms of securing the required votes, he filed suit in federal court this week to delay the election on the grounds that new convention by-laws violate the NBC’s constitution. Fortunately, the judge tossed the frivolous lawsuit aside. Of course ther…
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…ours massive quantities of the herbicide Velpar onto the Treaty Oak, a 500-year-old tree with a canopy that spread 127 feet. Like the Holy Thorn Tree, the Treaty Oak had historic and social significance. According to legend, the tree had long been a site for diplomacy among Native American tribes and it was here that city founder Stephen F. Austin signed a treaty establishing boundaries for Texas settlers. With tremendous effort and money, an outr…
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…ws, what women, what regular people experienced, day to day, week to week, year to year, under the Reich. What was striking about the search for one woman, was, in some ways, was realizing I needed to learn how to ask the right questions. Indeed: I needed to reconsider what those questions were, and where and of whom to ask them. Once I realized i had to shed a lot of my preconceived ideas on the period, and of my own family, I understood that des…
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