Religion Dispatches
…lled the “Hispanic Civil Rights Movement.” As Antonio Gonzalez head of the Southwest Voter’s Education Project stated, drawing parallels to the black civil rights protests of the 1960s: “For Hispanics, Arizona is Alabama and Maricopa County is Selma.” And much like the civil rights movement, Arizona’s draconian immigration law promises to divide religious groups into factions that won’t easily be repaired. The violence portrayed in MIA’s “Born Fre…
Read More…g the electric slide. This is what I noticed last week while attending the Southwest Believers Convention hosted by Kenneth and Gloria Copeland. Over 5.000 persons from across the country packed into the Fort Worth Convention Center to hear Copeland and their Word of Faith line-up proclaim their message of divine health and wealth. Yet when it came to President Obama’s plan for health care reform — a plan that would greatly assist the vast majorit…
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…em that this was a form of religious discrimination. The school districts, Southwest Dubois County Schools in Indiana and Federal Hocking Local Schools in Ohio, explained that they had never blocked TST’s website and that the task of determining which web content students can access is outsourced to a company called Lightspeed Systems, headquartered in Austin, Texas. Someone at Lightspeed Systems had manually tagged TST’s website as “mature,” mean…
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…ieved that things would ever change. This can happen again if a sufficient number of people in the churches and in the unions wake up. The good news is that people are indeed waking up, often in places where we least expect it, including within the large evangelical churches and their networks throughout the South and Southwest. That is partly why holding our event in Houston is so promising. You co-authored a powerful book with Kwok Pui Lan about…
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…raded the white working class for racially diverse voters in the South and Southwest. 2020 shows this was wrong. Biden won back Wisconsin, Michigan and (soon) Pennsylvania. Arizona and Georgia are on track. (North Carolina seems a longer shot.) This should scramble the conventional wisdom. It should lead to the following: while the GOP coalition is getting smaller, whiter and more regionally and ideologically homogeneous, the Democratic coalition…
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…streets of 21stcentury Tokyo, 19th century rural Paraguay, and Paleolithic southwest France? Do you understand human nature by finding fixed laws? Or do you grasp it by understanding the rules of humankind’s incredible un-fixedness? Shortly after finishing Barash’s book, I read a new essay by the photography critic Teju Cole. Reviewing photographer Steve McCurry’s new collection of photos of India, Cole makes a distinction between an individual pi…
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…campaign against Perriello, a Democrat representing a swath of central and southwest Virginia who was once considered a poster child for the Democrats’ faith outreach. After helping to launch Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Faithful America, Perriello beat Republican incumbent Virgil Goode in 2008, but is now virtually tied in the polls with his Republican challenger Robert Hurt. The ad, which FRC considers “one of the most humorous”…
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…nks. You have to determine that on your own.” Haggard’s weekly Oval Office phone calls and grip and grin NAE photo ops with former President George W. Bush are now mere vestiges of an old life, prior to what he calls the “crisis.” At New Life, which Jeff Sharlet described as “not just a battalion of spiritual warriors but a factory for ideas to arm them,” worship services were extravagant multimedia, fog machine-choked productions, in which Haggar…
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…slipped into the dorms we couldn’t get signed into, and posted hundreds of cheap notices printed on 8.5 x 11 paper. We’d invited a prominent imam to speak and ordered a delicious dinner, convinced that the perpetually elastic undergraduate stomach would be the gateway to the soul. The next morning, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were struck, thousands were murdered, New York City went into lockdown, and our community was sent reeling. Eve…
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…armed against. War in the name of faith is a recurring theme, as with cell-phone videos of beheadings. Krieger reads such rage within a dichotomy of “fundamentalist repression” and its opposite, freedom. Alhough she prefers the phrase “over-pervy libertinism” as, for her, the dichotomy is spread wide, with ISIS on one end and the antinomian carnival of de Sade’s vacation home at the other. That’s a freedom worth fighting for, she implies, but it i…
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