Religion Dispatches
…, just so, in a way that serves to unite Americans rather than to divide them. There are a zillion challenges, of course, but I think we are seeing a change in the politics of the pulpit that will be highly beneficial both to America’s politics and to our religion….
Read More…ortion, same-sex marriage and “religious liberty.” In fact, the loudest chorus of boos for Trump last night came when he said Clinton was only “pretending not to hate Catholics” based on the WikiLeaks emails, which isn’t much of a stretch from Kurtz’s statement. And Trump’s closing lines were a paean to the priorities of the Cardinal Dolan-Kurtz wing of the church: We can also agree on the need to stand up to anti-Catholic bias, to defend religiou…
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…ls. Yet, although Hunter cut the bodies of pregnant women down to their uteruses, he emphasized the connections between fetus and womb and the structure of the womb itself (roughly a third of the images show fetuses). In discovering the network of arteries and veins that linked mother and child through the placenta, he situated the child in the maternal body that nourished it. In the public mind, ultrasound technology downplays that linkage. Thoug…
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…arty affiliation, adherence to Christian nationalist beliefs, support for Trump, and race are clearly crucial factors with respect to American authoritarianism. Nevertheless, the notion that attending church has a moderating effect and should therefore be encouraged has, once again, been exploded by actual facts, as has the biased belief that America’s rapid secularization is bad for the country. Those who oppose authoritarianism and value democra…
Read More…alternative. They don’t want to join political parties because they don’t trust political parties, they don’t want to join a faith tradition because they don’t know which one is right (and they don’t trust them). Good luck, God bless, let me know when you figure out how to reach such people, because it’s a damn mystery to me. So those are what I see as the limits to the political effectiveness of the religious left. I don’t disagree that this year…
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…ep support among Palestinians who are tempted by more genuinely theocratic politics. The fire in Israel clearly sparked that temptation. Arab newspapers and websites carried comments like “O Allah, burn them before the Day of Judgment,” “O Allah, destroy them and all the enemies of Islam,” and, condemning Arab governments that helped Israeli firefighters, “May Allah take revenge against them and displace them together with our corrupt governments….
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…Bob Mumford, and Charles Simpson; the leading thinkers of Christian Reconstructionism—including R.J. Rushdoony, Gary North, and Gary DeMar; as well as Harold Lindsell, Editor Emeritus of Christianity Today, Christian Right leader Tim LaHaye, and Adrian Rogers, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, who was a leader in the fundamentalist takeover of the denomination. COR founder Jay Grimstead’s explanation (which has been taken down) of this…
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…owers—while delivering on the policy promises he’d made. Some called him Cyrus. Others called him King Con. Although he’s no longer president, the Age of Trump goes on. And the war for the world is full of opportunities for others. One of those poised to seize the day is Arkansas State Senator Jason Rapert (R-Conway). The former Chairman of the Arkansas State Legislative Prayer Caucus, (AKA Project Blitz) Rapert founded an offshoot bill mill in 20…
Read More…est of humanity had to endure for the past few hundred years? Senator Ted Cruz, like Mr. Seth Pecksniff, maintains the utmost horror toward sins of the flesh and the utmost contempt for fleshly sinners like Trump. Any hint of outward disloyalty or dishonesty likewise gives them the greatest alarm. But the very notion that there could be much more grievous sins of the spirit seems never to have occurred to either of them. I don’t know or care wheth…
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…uspices of a revival of “Holy Rus,” and more disturbingly a multinational “Russian World.” The Russian Orthodox Church, in many of its expressions, has been an active participant in Putin’s vision of global domination. Patriarch Kirill isn’t just a willing participant in the transnational expansion of Russian power, culture, and Christianity—he’s a co-conspirator in this worldbuilding project of faith and politics. But the matter goes beyond the h…
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