Religion Dispatches
…re was the usual riff that Obamacare was “socialized medicine,” a stunning number of the comments groused about the birth control mandate. There’s significant evidence from earlier Pew Foundation polling that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the contraceptive mandate and the subsequent war on “religious liberty” they ginned up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the…
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…e said to have an actual birthday, that date should be June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution—the number specified in order for the Constitution to be in full and binding effect for all 13 former colonies. Those who prefer a winter birthday might want to go for Dec. 15, 1791, the date on which the required three-fourths of the states had ratified the Bill of Rights. (I know: much too close to Christmas,…
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…cktail of political ideology and carefully-selected scripture has formed a new and improved culture warrior. At the end of the day Mr. Perkins is doing exactly what he complains the LGBT community is doing to his worldview and the justification that to act in such ways based on ‘the other’ acting in those same ways is not acceptable. It’s also a shame the Washington Post gave voice to someone trying to win a battle and tear down bridges, instead o…
Read More…about his criticism of the Iraq war. This time around in Washington DC and New York City, we hear about the “Pope-Soap-On-A-Rope” but not the people who work in Catholic schools for low wages. We see T-shirts for papal teddy bears, but no hint of the impact of the Vatican’s policy banning the use of condoms, even for those who are HIV-infected. Whether it is a Sunday morning talk show, the front page of a newspaper, or the evening news, I continue…
Read More…e larger point: Trump is still the one candidate who coalesces the largest number of evangelicals—even the weekly churchgoers—around him. Those numbers would likely shift should Trump face a two-man race with Ted Cruz. But if survey data still show what they have revealed so far—that Trump will continue to win at least a third of the most frequent church-attending evangelicals—it undermines anti-Trump evangelicals’ main argument about the suspect…
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…make a theological statement,” and that exceeds the bounds of science. The New York Times called it, “A startling about face.” To Dawkins, it represented “a cowardly flabbiness of the intellect,” while Johnson dismissed it as rank hypocrisy. If they agree on nothing else, Dawkins and Johnson the ID guru both assert that Darwinism and Christianity are at war and urge Americans to choose sides. Responding to the rise of young-earth creationism and I…
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…%). When Coney Barrett was nominated in September of 2020, Trump’s polling numbers among white evangelicals had dipped to a low of 55% in August 2020. However, once her nomination was made public that number rose to the normal average of 71%. Coney Barrett’s record on reproductive rights was a central issue in her confirmation hearings, as Anna North points out at Vox: Barrett, a Catholic and member of the religious group People of Praise, has als…
Read More…ny are on the job. In a recent post at Talk2Action, Wilson writes that the new 10-minute video “features never-before publicly heard audio from Sarah Palin’s key church, the Wasilla Assembly of God and never-before publicly seen footage from Pastor John Hagee’s now-infamous ‘God Sent Hitler’ 2005 sermon, in which Hagee pantomimes a Nazi holding a rifle pointed at Jews. ++++++++++ Hagee Hears a Who-madgeddon For the few gifted enough to retain info…
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…f the clan…. [The participant] does not know that the coming together of a number of men associated in the same life results in disengaging new energies, which transform each of them. All that he knows is that he is raised above himself and that he sees a different life from the one he ordinarily leads. However, he must connect these sensations to some external object as their cause. Now what does he see about him? On every side those things which…
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…of future dispatches about religion written from inundated shores, hopefully they will reflect that religious studies joined with the rest of the academy in rising to the colossal challenges of our time. Hopefully they will reflect new hiring patterns, new patterns of engagement with colleagues across the academy and, in our teaching and research, a foregrounding of the natural world upon which our survival, let alone our intersectional flourishi…
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