Religion Dispatches
…rected by a young African-American (whom I knew when he was a toddler), is opening up in Chicago. It opened last week in New York to grave reviews and a few awards. If you are near by I hope you check it out: “Mooz-lum”, the movie. It is not the story of every African-American Muslim but it is a story about African-American Islam, in one of its many reflections. We are here. We were here before September 11, 2001. Since we survived the peculiar in…
Read More
…e of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities. I cannot count the number of times I have heard well-meaning, good-hearted people respond to this appeal, saying, “Things are a lot better for gay people today than they were several years (or decades) ago. In time, our society (or churches) will come around on this issue.” To these friends and others, I must say, “It’s time.” For Lucas, Brown, Clementi, Walsh, and Chase the time is up. For t…
Read More
…ion—despite, or maybe due to, the fact that many prominent journalists are openly hostile to the teachings of the Church. Much of this is the legacy of the man who boldly put both a pope and “popery” on the cover of his magazine almost ninety years ago: a Protestant missionary’s son who found himself in bed with the Church in more ways than one. For Henry Luce, there was of course the actual Catholic with whom he shared his home, his second wife C…
Read More…able to have monuments on capital grounds. In Detroit, The Satanic Temple opened a new chapterhouse headed by Jex Blackmore (Satanic pseudonyms help to curb death threats). Blackmore has been especially active in opposing Michigan’s informed consent law. More chapter houses are opening in San Antonio and other cities around the country. The Detroit Free Press featured an interview with one Tom Raspotnik, an independent Satanist. Raspotnik describ…
Read More
…some of Jim and Tammy’s appeal. PTL was all about images so there were any number of options. Too bad books can’t come with a dozen different covers to choose from. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? I love the writing style of Lawrence Wright and Hampton Sides. They are both masters at weaving nonfiction into a page-turner. Anything half as good would be fine with me. What’s your next book? I’m not sure yet. Hopef…
Read More
…hip hop are the devil’s music with no redeeming features. But the growing number of artists and outlets for Christian rap (like the Web site Holy Culture) are challenging many stereotypes and perceptions about how entertainment and evangelization mix to bring a distinctly Christian message to young folks today. And in the recent efforts by conservative Christians to shape the content of educational textbooks in Texas, country and western music ha…
Read More
…faith through a prism of American nationalism? Not to mention the growing number of Americans without any religious commitment? Beck tells us, “you must fall to your knees and you must reconnect with God. He is not asking you. He is commanding us as a people to get behind Him. He will right the wrongs. We will have to pay a price because we lived outside of His laws. We will have to pay a price, but every day we don’t get behind Him, the price ge…
Read MoreWhile a number of conservative Christian leaders raise questions about Glenn Beck’s Mormonism, Worldview Matters’ host Brannon Howse continued his attack in a conversation with Kirk Cameron about why Cameron did not participate in Glenn Beck’s Divine Destiny. Howse marveled at the “thick irony” wherein Cameron (the actor who played Buck, the converted journalist warning about the “demonic spirituality of a one world religion” in the Left Behind m…
Read More
…ss prevalent in the Orthodox community than anywhere else; but there are a number of peculiarities to Orthodox Jewish life that have made the reporting of abuse less common than in society at large. “I think the subject of abuse is probably the same in any religious community,” says Michael Salomon, a Long Island psychiatrist, who has just finished working on an as-yet-unpublished book about sexual abuse in the Orthodox world. “Different religions…
Read More
…o “blasphemous content.” The IHEU reports being contacted by an increasing number of secularist groups organizing on Facebook, including groups in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Sudan. In all of this, the United States is an anomaly since it rejects even laws against religious hate speech, which were found in 36 of 45 European states in 2011. It’s the best place in the wo…
Read More