Religion Dispatches
…the country put together possess. We now owe nearly $57 trillion while our net worth is $56.5 trillion. President-elect Barack Obama has said that we can expect a trillion dollars in additional debt each year as far as the eye can see into the future. Soon Obama will ask Congress for an additional trillion dollars to bail out certain large companies. Remember when they gave $350 billion to the banks? That money is gone and guess what? The banks ca…
Read More…y criticized the budgets put forward by Ryan because they would gut safety net programs for the poor. But this isn’t surprising given the enduring ties between institutional Republicans and the conservative wing of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Dolan and his ilk have been cozy with the leadership of the GOP since the Bush administration, when a number of archbishops and cardinals openly campaigned for Bush. It was in the bishops’ intere…
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…rd-Faith evangelist Kenneth Copeland and sent out via Hagee’s broadcasting network, a co-sermon in which Copeland declared divine power to be a technology humans could learn and wield. It was a classic form of Christian heresy and yet, as with many aspects of the evolving Christian right culture, such views have generally been ignored as marginal by the American mainstream. So why did Senator McCain pursue John Hagee’s endorsement for over a year,…
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…ty subject to Israeli incursion and rules) to Kahanism, whether implied in Netanyahu or explicit in his “Religious Zionist” allies, none of whom are even condemned anymore by mainstream American Jewish organizations, as they were two years ago. The Israeli writer and public intellectual Yossi Klein Halevi made this clear to me in a recent interview, insisting that those like Naftali Bennett who advocate formal annexation without extending democrac…
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…r homes to foreclosure. Millions more carry debts that exceed their family net worth. Unemployment is rising and employers offering basic benefits like health care are shrinking. Nearly a quarter of a million jobs were lost in the United States just in October. The challenges American workers face getting and keeping good jobs will probably not be the first issues tackled by our new president and his team, given the meltdown of the banking industr…
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…ve scoring for religion, but also a few points on the plus side make for a net positive overall. He moves on to consider freedom of conscience, where it can certainly be argued that religious groups—mainly the dissident ones—did in fact make some degree of conscientious objection possible in the midst of raging war fever during both the First and Second World Wars. Wuthnow doesn’t dwell on the religious voices that were baying for the objectors to…
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…conomic questions. They all seem to agree that a responsible social safety net is a good thing, and beyond that there’s some diversity in viewpoint. Same with immigration: they all believe that immigrants should be treated with dignity and respect. After that, there are a lot of different views. But where you get the real differences is in priorities. What’s more important: abortion or immigrant rights? Most bishops would try to say “both, equally…
Read More…department’s actions. Does the religious 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 ser…
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…innacle of Johnson’s work turned out to be supporting the failed bid of Kenneth Blackwell for governor in 2006. And he found himself in a swirl of controversy: the IRS placed a lien on him and his wife for failure to pay $22,269 in income taxes and penalties from 2002 to 2004; his church and the school and hotel it owns showed a net operating loss of $1.5 million for its fiscal year ending in June 2007; official complaints were filed against his c…
Read More…nation for decades now, and what has it gotten us? A frayed social safety net, crumbling infrastructure, massive inequalities in income, health, and opportunity, and a financial system that makes a den of fire-breathing pirate vipers an appealing alternative. Oh, and the finest (and most expensive) military ever known to man. More properly, we have balanced the ideological insanity that is modern conservatism — don’t argue with me, when Ann freak…
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