Religion Dispatches
…g happen in the Middle East prophetically? You are seeing the King of the South come together with lightning speed. Egypt has an army of one million men armed with 1500 Abram Tanks which are America’s best. We sold them to Egypt along with hundreds of our latest and greatest fighter jets because Egypt was controlled by Mubarak who was America’s friend. Can you imagine what Israel faces with Iran, Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Russia coming after the…
Read More…urches, I several times heard him refer to himself as a “Bapti-costal” — a Southern Baptist with Pentecostal sensibilities. He positions himself with the Christian nation mythology, being the candidate of choice at the gatherings of Renewal Projects, which often featured Newt Gingrich’s “Rediscovering God In America” lectures. The Renewal Projects hosted “Pastors’ Policy Briefings,” and in Iowa, these gatherings were thought to be effective get-ou…
Read More…n a decade Kohler was shipping the work to new non-union facilities in the South. Just last year the current magnate—yet another Herbert Kohler—pushed through a greatly weakened contract for the small number of Local 833 members still employed in Wisconsin. I say all this to make the point that American business and its “business-friendly” sock puppets like Gov. Scott Walker will stop at nothing—nothing—to roll back worker rights and worker securi…
Read More…a recent Iowa briefing had been distributed to 5,000 churches. Talk about free advertising! The other Republican candidates have griped about their exclusion from speaking at the pastors’ briefings. While Lane insisted that he had invited all the candidates, Darrell Ng, a spokeperson for the Fred Thompson campaign, said Thompson was only invited to attend, not to speak, and produced the form invitation the campaign received. He added, “it’s clear…
Read More…businesses also is reminiscent of those who defended Jim Crow laws in the South. Those business owners, too, thought they had a right to serve whomever they pleased and bar whomever they hated. But, if you’re a business open to the public—no matter how private your ownership—you must be open to the entire public. This is the basis of “equal treatment” and the government has a right to enforce that. So, Rev. Davis and his cohorts want the governme…
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…es but the soundtrack for democracy’s slow but steady march toward greater freedom and equality in the modern era. In the process, black gospel was effectively nationalized as an American cultural resource. Many stars of R&B, Motown, and Soul music who rose to prominence in the ’60s and ’70s got their start singing in church. These artists regularly made a point of explicitly incorporating the sounds and styles of the African American sacred tradi…
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…can Catholicism, ever produced. Father Matthew was neither famous nor self-promoting, which is what makes the lyrical strains of the notes he did produce so very eloquent and so very worth our hearing. Both men seem to me now the product of a different age and a different time, and more to the point, both men were the result of a different way of inhabiting time—a monastic, a poetic, and ultimately a rather silent way. Both men came of age in post…
Read More…high school clubs. Next up: atheists. The Secular Student Alliance, which promotes atheism and humanism with chapters at more than 200 colleges, is sending in reinforcements for teen free-thinkers—a push to launch 50 new high school clubs. Godless teens want the same social benefits that evangelical teens find at the annual “See you at the pole” flagpole prayer events at thousands of schools every September, and the court-sanctioned afterschool B…
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…m preaching on account of her gender. She connects apartheid in her native South Africa with this apartheid at the altar. Alta Jacko draws on Sojourner Truth as part of her inspiration to become what she was forbidden to be by a patriarchal Church. Victoria Rue laughingly tells about distributing Necco Wafers to the children in her neighborhood when they played Mass. There is a lot of footage of ordination ceremonies with women in colorful vestmen…
Read More…n of local churches and citizens and sits on Courthouse Square. A woman in South Carolina viciously killed a “devil dog” after it chewed up her Bible. A new study predicts that the world’s Muslim population will double in the next twenty years. An embattled mosque in Temecula, CA has been unanimously approved by the city council. While they opposed the Park51 Islamic center and mosque in Manhattan, the Anti-Defamation League is supporting other mo…
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