Religion Dispatches
…ment for the Guardian. Waldman observes: But it won’t be easy for secular Americans to become better organized as a political force, even as they increase in number. The major impediment to that kind of organization is the fact that it is very difficult for secularists to conceive of themselves in tribal terms. Most tribes, whether of nations or ethnicities or sports fandom, can easily demarcate their membership—it’s the people who look like us,…
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…be live-streamed, starting Wednesday, June 15). The bishops will take up a number of issues, from the revised liturgy to assisted suicide, but their conversations are sure to be dominated by an issue that has been dogging them since the mid-1980s: sexually abusive priests and the bishops who enabled them. Ten years after Cardinal Bernard Law became the poster bishop for failed religious leadership, new revelations of episcopal misfeasance threaten…
Read More…were more mundane and predictable: Section Two redefined how we distribute numbers of representatives state-by-state, by “counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed”; and Section Three excluded from future service any member of the government who had previously sworn an oath of office to the State and then joined the Confederacy in open rebellion. Predictable stuff, really. After winning the War, Washington int…
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…arly encouraging, but there are a few exceptions. For example, only 34% of Americans believe that it is never appropriate to teach in public schools that some Americans are transgender. This and similar figures regarding feelings about same-sex relationships—for which there is very little difference between those who are parents and those who aren’t—could be useful for fighting against the well-organized efforts of minority control over school lib…
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…se, and truth be told, not in the secular sense either. True, about 75% of Americans call themselves Christians, but only half or so of those are regular practitioners, and the numbers continue to decline. Meanwhile, the nation as a whole has seen a significant shift to the left by party affiliation if not by ideological descriptor. Only a determined minority of social conservatives continues to move to the right. It’s easy to get lost in the fog…
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…ibly resonate. The Rolling Stone review of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over the Sea says, “his lyrics carry the innocent piety of the early Beats, with semireligious visions and a pre-electronic-age feel: medicines, Sunday shoes, holy rattlesnakes and the… king of carrot flowers.” The review conveniently skips over lyrics referring to holy water, miracles, and everlasting life, which defy categorizations like “innocent piety.” The Pitchf…
Read More…al Imams,” based on a remark made 12 years ago by neoconservative-friendly American Muslim leader, Shaykh Hisham Kabbani. In honor of this magic number and the hearings King will hold next month in order to address the “creeping threat of Sharia law,” RD presents the first edition of Life Imitates Satire Imitates Life. In this clip, from the Manchurian Candidate a Joseph McCarthy stand-in uses his own investigative tool to determine how many cry…
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…nine on the Richter scale. It devastated the population. Estimates of the number of people killed range from 10,000 to 100,000. At the time the quake struck, worshipers filled the churches honoring their dead. The churches, the worshippers, and the city around them were effectively destroyed. Not long after the major quake hit, a tsunami followed that killed those who had rushed to the beaches in fear to avoid the havoc of the earthquake. The cat…
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…5) Robertson plays his part in the Iran-Contra scandal. During the Central American civil wars of the 1980s, Robertson helped fund “cities of refuge” in Guatemala (what were called “strategic hamlets” in Vietnam), and camps for Nicaraguan Contras. Today, in the aftermath of wars started by Bush and Cheney (also supported by Robertson), these might seem trivial in scale. Nevertheless in the 1980s allies of Reagan, funded illegally through the Iran-…
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