Religion Dispatches
…vernment, perhaps a unity coalition guaranteed by the military, leading to free and fair elections after the shortest time possible within which campaigning can be organized. This requires all the stakeholders on the ground, who are not representatives of the dictatorship, to come to the table, and to receive guarantees both from one another but also from regional powers who can help nudge the process forward. The military has won itself a seat at…
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…n the Middle East represented a position Israel had to support even as it knew, for at least two reasons, that it would not necessarily be “good for the Jews.” First, if another true democracy did emerge in the Arab Middle East, Israel’s exceptionalist claim would essentially disappear. And second, given the anti-Israel and Islamist sentiment in the Arab street, Israel knows that an Arab democracy could produce a government even more antagonistic…
Read More…then a statement from another activist that pointed out that this is not a new canard. To talk about homosexuality as an illness is an old trope and it does not belong to any one religion. We still see ongoing issues in various Christian “ex-Gay” movements. Most importantly, they got a gay Muslim, Parvez Sharma, to talk about his reaction and his question as to whether the community will be welcoming. Only time will answer Sharma’s question, but a…
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…Jesus who says “Welcome the stranger” and “I’ve come to set the prisoners free.” What’s your advice to people of color in white evangelical spaces? We have done two things for too long. One, we have centered white people in our conversations around race and power. We have placed at the center of the conversation the question of whether or not white people will accept the message. We have held back the reality of the impact of their public actions…
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…age-old struggles; we are blessed by a unique ability—indeed destiny—to be free of conflict, to be free of the past, to “believe in the same dream that says this is a country where anything’s possible.” Anything? Really? You can almost hear the pantheon of European Christian theologians groaning from their graves in disbelief. But, hey, this is the New World where the frontier has traditionally offered the eternal lure of new beginnings and…
Read More…data: 50 percent of white evangelicals say they believe capitalism and the free market are at odds with Christian values. According to the survey, white evangelicals are more likely to say the free market and Christian values are at odds than black Protestants, mainline Protestants, Catholics, and religiously unaffiliated Americans. On first glance that seems difficult to accept given white evangelicals’ overwhelming electoral support for the Repu…
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…s many historians oversimplify by identifying Calvinism as the Ursprung of free market capitalism, Keddie more precisely singles out Arminianism, the deviation from orthodox Calvinism that reserved some room for human effort in the work of salvation. He pinpoints the crucial contribution of Hugo Grotius, whom the Dutch government locked up for his Arminian heresy, in laying the legal groundwork for unrestricted pursuit of private gain and the expl…
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