Religion Dispatches
…have given myself permission not to have good nights and so if I get up to read a book watch the second half of a movie already playing (but NO technology, no internet: that’s a endless tunnel), then I return for another 2-3 hour snippet, I am no longer upset by this. I’ve made my peace with it. I’ve given the tweet or the status update: “I think 8 hours of sleep is something someone dreamed up.” I know people who say they get 8 as a minimum, and…
Read More…d of experience then you cannot understand this book and might as well NOT read it. Who does that? Who writes then asks people not to read? Well some things really are based upon experience. No matter how much we might impart information surrounding this experience, unless one has had the experience, these words sound awfully empty or awfully phony. So unless you have had an encounter with God, then it is pretty hard to verify what I will attempt…
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…s of the country, from those sponsored by self-identified Christian Reconstructionist groups to others sponsored by home school organizations where most people haven’t even heard of Christian Reconstructionists (the number of people in attendance has ranged from 300 to 3000). I see religion everywhere; even in places that are ostensibly secular, just beneath the surface is a God and Country patriotism that is rooted in conservative American Protes…
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…nal heritage will turn into a system of imposed rule over two peoples, one ruling and the other ruled. The second process was the worsening of Jewish-Arab relations within the borders of the State of Israel: The occupation in the West Bank and Gaza will bring about solidarity of the half a million Israeli Arab citizens with their brothers in the occupied territories. This will lead to a radical change in their state of mind. Inevitably, they will…
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…likely has something to do with rising identitarian Christian nationalist politics. Christian nationalism has become increasingly explicit among Trump supporters and the Republican Party’s base over the past few years, as Trump and other Republican leaders like Florida governor Ron DeSantis have shattered political norms and vigorously pursued the culture-warring objectives of the raging Christian Right. That marriage between conservative, mostly…
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…lection. That has been hard to see given that Trump’s election was a backlash against Obama’s. But remember the energies that coalesced in the past six months. The politics of Black Lives Matter, which came to be after Michael Brown was shot to death in 2014, merged with anti-Trump politics. Literally, white people came together with Black people—in other words, their interests fused—to create the biggest coalition in the history of presidential e…
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…to publish in a big-ticket outlet. It goes like this: Q: Who promulgated Rerum Novarum? A: Pope Leo XIII promulgated Rerum Novarum, placing the Catholic church on the side of labor. Q: Who wrote The Social Gospel? A: Walter Rauschenbusch wrote the Social Gospel, paving the way for Christian involvement in liberal social reform. Q: Who twice appeared on the cover of Time magazine? A: Reinhold Niebuhr twice appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Wh…
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…s a nervousness on the part of broadcasters in America—not about taking on politics or Donald Trump, but about taking on the CNP. The fear of taking on the CNP is that you have these national religious broadcast networks, and if I were a big broadcast network in the United States, yeah, I’d be a little afraid of Donald Trump, but I’d be more afraid of a Christian boycott of my platform. CS: This is something I’m constantly up against in trying to…
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…ion is all about resisting it. Although it may be somewhat hard to believe today, the people known as Baptists used to be especially keen on the matter of resisting coercion, no doubt because they had been so harshly persecuted, even by their fellow Dissenters. Prior to the 1979 Dallas putsch within the Southern Baptist Convention, almost all U.S. Baptists were strong on the need to resist coerced belief. They hated creeds and formulas. Their grea…
Read More…practice of citizenship consists, aside from voting every couple years, of reading a lot of stuff so that I can stay informed, then forming opinions about public policy and arguing with people on the internet about it. Like the Guatemalan strategy, this approach is premised on individualism: if the debates have a point, it is to change people’s opinions, one by one, so that they will then vote the right way. When I look at things that way, I wonde…
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