Religion Dispatches
…Christians who don’t support Obama: J. Lee Grady, the editor of Charismamagazine, has written an interesting, albeit mostly anecdotal, column about the travails of African Americans that are not voting for Obama. “It’s not easy to go against the flow when it seems that the entire black community is marching in lockstep with the well-financed Obama machine,” writes Grady in a piece titled “Breaking Up (With Obama) Is Hard to Do.” Grady lists a host…
Read More…rnment and Jeffrey Goldberg served in the army of a foreign state. It is amazing that Shales seems to be making both a pro-Israel argument and an anti-Semitic one in the same breath. Perhaps Shales is an Apocalyptic Christian who believes in Israel for the return of Jesus, but not in the value of Jews. I know nothing of Shales’ religious or political beliefs, I can only judge him by what he says. Amanpour has no such ambiguous statements on her re…
Read More…ng funny without offending someone these days in our PC society etc.” The number of supportive and sometimes racist posts outnumber those who advice caution. I can’t suspect such hideous posts are all from Saddleback membership. I’m sure quite a number are. It’s as disturbing as it is disgusting. Warren commented on Tsang’s article, “Thanks so much for teaching us! It was removed instantly.” However, Warren did not get around to posting a form…
Read More
…ify hate and violence. And while the coincidence of being born under the “Sign of the Beast” in Topeka 666 is still a little unnerving, there are differing opinions about the number’s translation. Some theologians suggest the number should really be 616, in which case, all eyes on Peoria, Illinois….
Read More
…e deadliest peacetime attack on America by a single gunman. Since an equal number of Virginia Tech students and American-born Muslims have gone on killing sprees, Goldberg should clearly be asking to investigate Virginia Tech’s mental health support structures. Or perhaps, using Goldberg’s logic, we should investigate whether East Asian men have a propensity to mass murder, given the ethnicity both of the Virginia Tech and Binghamton shooters. For…
Read More…learning from our colleagues and exploring these complex histories over a number of years, we have found that religious liberty is not a single, stable principle existing outside of history, as it is often depicted (particularly in policy circles in North America and Europe and by many academics invested in promoting religious freedom). It is, rather, an inescapably context-bound, polyvalent concept unfolding within divergent histories in differi…
Read More
…hite evangelicals; the Utah College Exit Poll, however, with a much higher number of Mormon participants, put the number closer to 45 percent. Both figures are well below previous Mormon voting percentages for the Republican candidates, but they indicate that at least half of Latter-day Saints were willing to stomach Trump’s apparent moral deficiencies. This turn of events has historical precedent. Though the LDS Church’s political affiliation was…
Read More
…actice, material culture and daily life as well as the law. I then spent a number of years tracking down, unearthing and interpreting the many iterations of the ancient biblical passages that turned out, much to my surprise and delight, to be just about everywhere in the United States of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? What a country! The stalwart, enduring presence of the Ten Comman…
Read More
…ief revisiting here. A Missouri state program offered grants for a limited number of nonprofit schools and daycares to purchase rubber playground surfaces made from recycled tires. Prospective grantees were evaluated and selected based on a number of factors, including poverty level of the surrounding area and their willingness to generate media exposure for Missouri. In 2012, Trinity Lutheran, a Missouri Synod congregation, applied for the grant…
Read More
…looks to be releasing new information on the Catholic vote on Halloween, a number which often closely tracks the final total of overall voters. It’s also a number that varies quite a bit by the racial breakdown. While Trump wins white Catholics 48-41, he gets absolutely crushed among Hispanics, 84-12. A few back-of-the-envelope calculations put us firmly in “Holy shit” territory. Even assuming a generous 50-50 split of black, Asian, and other Cath…
Read More