Religion Dispatches
…Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme” and a “monstrous lie” has drawn mixed reactions from fellow conservatives, and attacks from his presidential rivals, most immediately Mitt Romney. Michele Bachmann, too, will reportedly criticize him at the Tea Party-sponsored debate tonight in Tampa, Florida. A Bachmann adviser tells the Washington Examiner’s Byron York, “Clearly she feels differently about the value of Social Security than Gov. Perry does. Sh…
Read More…right have a role to play in the net neutrality debate? Another Baptist preacher is preaching against the sins of transfats. Rev. Michael O. Minor is fighting fat from his pulpit in the Mississippi Delta. He may want to mix in a few sermons on marriage. The Bible Belt has a higher divorce rate than the Northeast, researchers say. Some rabbis are getting help from comedy writers for their High Holy Day sermons. Glenn Beck (remember him?) held his…
Read More…more time. A couple of weeks ago, George Packer wrote a piece in which he featured a down-and-out family—the Hartzells of Tampa, FL—who were getting ready to pack up their meager belongings and head off to stay with friends in remote North Georgia in hopes that something better might turn up. There are millions of families like the Hartzells out there—the Joads of this ruthless new economy—but there is no evidence at all that anyone in the politic…
Read More…entiment, though many times for good reason. It has unfortunately been replaced by an unsatisfying, often unpopular, elitist, and distant capitalist project, which is economically unnerving and therefore also culturally terrifying. Meanwhile, the old Left is often either complicit in the worst excesses of that project, or too fractured or alienated to speak cogently to new challenges. Combined with relatively fast-growing Muslim populations (for n…
Read More…tical leaders have systematically exempted the rich and powerful from the reach of progressive taxation. As Eduardo Porter noted in the New York Times a few weeks back, since 1970 we have cut the effective rate of taxation for our very wealthiest in half: from 35 percent on average to 16.62 percent. Overall tax revenues in the United States haven’t reached 30 percent of GDP since 1965. We spend less on cash transfers to needy people—unemployment i…
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…n says that the writers of the Constitution settled the whole debate over teaching evolution – at least 70 years before Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species. Heck, they settled it even 20 years before Darwin was born. “As far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, they’d already had the entire debate over creation and evolution, and you get Thomas Paine, who is the least religious Founding Father, saying you’ve got to teach Creation scie…
Read More…opposed a health care reform bill that conservatives falsely claimed included federal funding of abortion services. At the same time, Catholics United won’t address the USCCB’s stance on abortion or contraception, but Catholics for Choice certainly does. The spoils shouldn’t all go to the powerful organizations who claim to represent all their minions; American Catholics, in particular, are hardly a politically homogenous lot, as Salt v. Ryan show…
Read More…his recommendation that the curriculum give equal weight in importance to teaching the Declaration of Independence as the US Constitution. As a clue to Barton’s motivation, nowhere in the Constitution is there a reference to God; but in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson refers to a creator, as well as “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” The board adopted Barton’s recommendation and the final curriculum requires students to le…
Read More…n insists that the bill is not anti-evolution, but merely about improving teaching in the public schools, comments by the bill’s supporters reveal a stunning hostility towards science and education. Andy Sher writing for the Chattanooga Free Press, quotes bill-supporter Rep. Richard Floyd, R-Chattanooga, saying that “since the late ‘50s, early ‘60s when we let the intellectual bullies hijack our education system, we’ve been on a slippery slope.” F…
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…reat liberal challenge, the Supreme Court. And the country exploded. The breach of the population’s trust in its government, the settler narrative becoming the narrative of the country, and many Israelis simply getting sick and tired of the occupation (to say nothing of the secular/religious divide), put Israel in a place where various sets of interlocking problems threatened to paralyze the country, all the while believing Hamas was not an immine…
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