Religion Dispatches
…our text. My mother was part of a group of women—a Jew, a Catholic, and an African American—that toured high schools to talk on race and religion and allow the students to meet people who were not like themselves, in many cases for the first time. These are the type of experiences that shaped me, that shape all Southerners. In Sacred Cause Desmond and Moore argue, with overwhelming evidence, that Darwin, too, was immersed in issues of race from th…
Read More…they suggest, when corporate America suffered its own version of sporting free agency. They were primarily “retention bonuses,” they argue, designed to keep top executives from leaving for the greener pastures of the competition. The reward is not so much to the office-holder, as it is to the person currently in the office, essentially a monetary incentive begging the current officeholder not to leave. Enter President Barack Obama, a man who bril…
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…epublican National Convention. The convention took place at a bad time for Republicans—the Cold War had ended and George H.W. Bush had raised taxes despite a pledge not to. As a result, he didn’t have much to run on other than the concept of “family values,” which the Republicans invoked following the riots in Los Angeles (this was when Dan Quayle condemned the TV character “Murphy Brown” for having a child out of wedlock in a speech to the Common…
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…during the recent Israel-Hamas conflict. Richard Goldstone, a former South African judge appointed to lead the Gaza investigation by the UN’s Human Rights Council, told the Voice of America last month that he also plans to hold public hearings in which witnesses to the conflict tell their stories. The investigation is likely to put the spotlight on Israel’s growing isolation in the international community, due in part to war crimes accusations. It…
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…of the right-wing talkers, criticizing them for where they’re dragging the Republican Party. But unfortunately, they’re also in pretty deep denial about just how deeply entrenched the problem is. You know, you have outfits like WorldNetDaily—whose most recent Jerome Corsi project is devoted to exploring Obama’s plan to round up conservatives and put them in concentration camps—selling its mailing list to the Republican National Committee and doing…
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…d to recognize the stomp-down amazing fact that we not only have the first African American president, but the first tribal president in American history. Millions of Americans spend billions of dollars through genealogists or DNA tests trying to trace their ancestry to Indian tribes in America, or the tribes of Africa, and Barack Obama knows—and so do I. Ndaw nishnabe podwewadmi ewi chigwe dodem: I am a Potawatomi of the Strikes the Earth People….
Read More…ation Blessing’s planes were transporting diamond-mining equipment for the African Development Corporation, a Robertson-owned venture initiated with the cooperation of Zaire’s then-dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. I can’t help but believe that Robertson’s empire will stop at nothing to defend its wealth at the expense of the least of these. But, perhaps others in the viewing audience might be moved by this new Bible to get the job done. I do believe, h…
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…ance, has acquired a whole new symbolic register thanks to its role in the African American freedom struggle of the last century, particularly as the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s oratory. Who knows what work it might perform in the future. And who can tell what the World War II Memorial might mean to Americans decades from now. If we are lucky, its unapologetic braggadocio will look like a historical aberration; if we are less so, it will appe…
Read More…of gay Republicans, like Christopher Barron, who found the traditional gay Republican group, the Log Cabin Republicans, to be far too liberal for their tastes: “Essentially, there’s no voice for gay Republicans or gay conservatives in particular in D.C. right now. Log Cabin has been completely and totally absent here in D.C. for months and months,” Barron (a former Log Cabin political director) said. ”It has simply moved way too far from the left…
Read More…on a shooting spree in three different cities where he killed a number of African Americans and Jews and Asians that day. Those groups are groups that claim to be extremely anti-government and Christian identity oriented. Southers was not talking about ordinary churchgoers, but rather about the radical far right, described in the FBI’s Project Megiddo report as “a vast number and variety of groups, such as survivalists, militias, the Ku Klux Klan…
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