Religion Dispatches
…v. Dr. R. Guy Erwin, a professor of religion and history who will lead the Southwest California Synod. From GLAAD: Because he is openly gay and partnered, Dr. Erwin did not seek ordination in the ELCA when he was completing seminary. Instead, he completed a PhD in Lutheran history and spent most of his career as a teacher of Lutheran history. He met his partner Rob Flynn while he was studying for this PhD at Yale University. He and Rob are members…
Read More…”) on Capitol Hill had a sign supporting the DREAM Act. (h/t Religion News Service). “After all,” Phillips adds, “what can you say about a church that considers Hillary Clinton to be a member in good standing?” Phillips goes on to call the church “the religious arm of socialism” because it supports “illegal immigration” and “socialist health care;” in sum, “a socialist wish list.” After the Senate failed to break the Republican filibuster of the D…
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…jugorje; or massive immigrations over national borders, as in the American southwest, where Marian apparitions have flourished as Latino/a Catholics arrive in ever greater numbers. Journalists and television reporters, meanwhile, usually just poke fun at the latest Virgin on a Tree Stump or bleeding statue, without bothering to learn more about the long history of local Christian devotions and pilgrimage. Catholic bishops and parish priests usuall…
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…list theories. According to Robert C. Fuller in Naming the Antichrist, the Southwest Radio Church warned as early as 1975 that “The Beast” was the name of a supercomputer created to control the global economy. That same year, Christian dispensationalist Colin Deal expressed a similar theory, warning that “The Beast” could assign everyone on Earth an invisible “laser tattoo.” Similar technological suspicions were expressed by Emil Gaverluk and Patr…
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…uisition, was a response to Catharism, a dualist heresy that flourished in southwest France at the turn of the 13th century. A bloody twenty-year crusade stamped out the overt practice of Catharism, though underground its embers continued to smolder. Thus in 1231, Pope Gregory IX created the role of inquisitor, a “detective, prosecutor, and judge rolled into one,” as Murphy puts it. Usually a Dominican friar, the inquisitor moved fast, traveling w…
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…day at 6 p.m. and say a prayer for “Grandmother Earth.” He asked Landry, a southwest Louisiana songwriter and emerging grassroots activist, to introduce his campaign to communities in the region, including Indian Nations such as the Choctaw and the Houma. “People in southern Louisiana are people of faith,” Landry said. “Even if you don’t believe in God, it still can bring people together.” While President Obama, in his much-debated Oval Office Add…
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During five years of research in southwest Louisiana for my book “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,” I came to know many white, older tea party enthusiasts. Nearly all now support Donald Trump. It was because of his penchant for conspiracies, not in spite of it. – Arlie Russell Hochschild, Washington Post, 11/7/16 In mid-October Alex Jones, host of Infowars, infamous breeding ground of conspiracy theories, ann…
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…campaign against Perriello, a Democrat representing a swath of central and southwest Virginia who was once considered a poster child for the Democrats’ faith outreach. After helping to launch Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Faithful America, Perriello beat Republican incumbent Virgil Goode in 2008, but is now virtually tied in the polls with his Republican challenger Robert Hurt. The ad, which FRC considers “one of the most humorous”…
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…ve been present here since the 1800s. Moreover, lest we forget, the entire Southwest was once part of Mexico. By idealizing a heteronormative white Christian state, Trump is embracing a view of America that never existed, and is assuring a large swath of the country that it can avoid diversity and demographic change. In doing so, he is also denying the legal and symbolic citizenship of millions. While legal scholars—and many in Trump’s own party—a…
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…em that this was a form of religious discrimination. The school districts, Southwest Dubois County Schools in Indiana and Federal Hocking Local Schools in Ohio, explained that they had never blocked TST’s website and that the task of determining which web content students can access is outsourced to a company called Lightspeed Systems, headquartered in Austin, Texas. Someone at Lightspeed Systems had manually tagged TST’s website as “mature,” mean…
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