Religion Dispatches
…a cemetery all over again. And tomorrow that same Pyramid will become the central symbol and staging area for an ancient-style Roman triumph celebrating a very modern kind of gay pride. And one day after that, some thousands of miles away, citizens in the United States celebrated something else with parades: their independence, their freedom from undue oppression and interference in their personal affairs. It can be overwhelming, this palimpsesti…
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…some who reside in the Mount Vernon School District in conservative south-central Ohio. Last December she and her husband Steve accused a popular 8th-grade science teacher, John Freshwater, of using an electrostatic device known as a Tesla coil to brand a cross into Zachary’s arm [see image above]. They say the burn, which in photos show an 8-by-4-inch mark on his forearm, raised blisters, kept their son awake that night, and lasted for several w…
Read More…vangelicals and other serious religious people will not automatically vote Republican. What is omitted from this scenario, often so pleasing to liberals and progressives, is a woman’s right to make decisions about her body. Abortion rights is talked about as an unfortunate issue that they wish were not there. As a point of fact, these more moderate evangelical leaders are still opposed to a woman’s right to choose. On the night before the 2004 ele…
Read More…were pulled in by the traditional values rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and his Republican friends. Unmoved by this mass defection, Democrats then ushered Catholics out. At the nub of these shifts was the 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, that legalized abortion. Abortion would become central to the politics of the next three decades; the beating heart of the Right’s crusade for traditional values and the cherished prize of feminists and the Le…
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…and Parsley are trotted out as shining examples of Christian leadership by Republican politicians, their critics often define them by their easily documented diatribes against Satan, the liberal media, other religions, or even witchcraft. Hagee, as founder of the Christian Zionist group Christians United for Israel (CUFI), is associated with his efforts to inject his eschatology into Washington’s foreign policy debate, with his calls for a preempt…
Read More…here the experience of military service is nearly universal and culturally central, the films’ focus on émigrés (sometimes pejoratively called yoredim, “those who go down”) suggests not all is well with Zionism. Post-Zionism, a term made familiar in the 1990s by Israeli intellectuals, was denounced by some after the attacks of September 11, 2001, but the term continues to describe a range of positions in Israeli culture and politics. Sociologist U…
Read More…the war. In 2006, the United Church of Christ tried to buy television ads promoting religious diversity under the rubric “God is Still Speaking”; NBC and CBS refused to accept them. No doubt mainline leaders are less organized and more demoralized than one might wish; they play their role in a downward spiral involving power, morale, and cultural salience. Sullivan has a good eye for anecdotes that dramatize these problems (and deepen the ruts in…
Read More…a First Lady.” Here was McCain, the angry old warrior, deploying sex as a central political weapon to recharge his potency, his party’s fortunes and the cultural oomph of the right. Not gender. The Republicans didn’t need just any woman to compete with Obama for the Wow factor, the Mmm factor, the stable, loving family factor. It is a calculated bonus that adherents can now speak loftily of making history, but for different reasons, drawing deep…
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…ince the “dwellers” that their candidate is just as deeply commited as any Republican to a permanent structure of American values. But they are fighting an uphill battle. The spirituality of dwelling requires a threatening enemy to fight against. Democrats can hardly cast Republicans as agents of cultural change who would undermine the stability of “the American way.” Too few voters would buy that. Nor can the Dems cast the many “seekers” under th…
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…in American politics, managing to shape the focus and goals of a resurgent Republican Party. The Christian Coalition built up Republican support at the grassroots level, mobilizing churches and religious groups in national voter registration campaigns. And even though the Christian Coalition, like the larger religious right, was made up of a number of churches and faiths, evangelicals were the face the national media associated with the movement….
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