Religion Dispatches
…Sadly, only eight people survived the flood in Noah’s time,” he said. “The number of people that are going to be saved is going to be very small.” All this rapture talk reminds me of a morning I spent in the chair at my hair salon. My hairdresser had been reading Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series. She may be among the few convinced by Evans of the Rapture’s date. She was terrified after reading these books. “Sherrie,” I said, “all that Rapture theol…
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…looks to be releasing new information on the Catholic vote on Halloween, a number which often closely tracks the final total of overall voters. It’s also a number that varies quite a bit by the racial breakdown. While Trump wins white Catholics 48-41, he gets absolutely crushed among Hispanics, 84-12. A few back-of-the-envelope calculations put us firmly in “Holy shit” territory. Even assuming a generous 50-50 split of black, Asian, and other Cath…
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…mprised of same-sex attracted students committed to lifelong celibacy and “spiritual friendship.” (A pre-existing LGBT student group, which affirms marriage equality, is still not acknowledged officially by Biola.) Clearly, attitudes around LGBTQ inclusion are changing rapidly in the evangelical Christian community but they’re not following a linear path toward progress. Rather the change has been in a dynamic and almost chaotic way—two steps forw…
Read More…I wrote a piece for RD on the deployment of certain liberal values in the service of illiberal policies. At the top of this list was civility. I argued that some speakers have used the charge of incivility to silence or otherwise inhibit their critics. For my case study I used Ryan T. Anderson, who had written: The principal strategy of the forces that have worked for 20 years to redefine marriage to include same-sex unions has been cultural inti…
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…clusive of gender identity), prohibits differential treatment or denial of service based on any one of these protected classes. And that’s where the DOJ’s brief gets particularly twisted—and intellectually dishonest. It contends that Colorado’s non-discrimination law compels speech (which in this case means the design and baking of a cake in exchange for a fee) that contradicts the baker’s sincerely held religious belief. Such an imposition violat…
Read More…iders with religious objections to “redirect” patients who ask for a given service to appropriate sources in a “nonjudgmental fashion.” While the policy ensures that patients who ask about contraception will receive some type of referral, formal or not, it still falls far short of the current standard of care for adolescent patients. Both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommend that…
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…litics? In 2014, the Supreme Court issued its controversial Hobby Lobby decision, ruling that a corporation could be exempt from the contraception mandates of the Affordable Care Act. And more recently, in Indiana, we’ve seen arguments advanced that businesses should be allowed to refuse to provide service to same-sex weddings due to the religious beliefs of the owners. So we’re currently witnessing a resurgence of that ideology in American law wi…
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…that the earning prospects for many jobs are so pitiful that unprecedented numbers of workers have simply stopped looking; it’s not that inflation-adjusted income for households headed by someone with only a high-school education have fallen by almost 20% since 2008; it’s not that low-income people are still often shut out of needed preventive health care services, even under Obamacare; and it’s not that people within America’s lumpenproletariat a…
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…N turned “strangely combative” as anchor Alisyn Camerota “pressed him on a number of his recent controversial comments, including the claim that ‘many’ Americans are stupid and that ‘we’d be Cuba if it weren’t for Fox News.‘” Camerota reminds Carson she used to work at Fox News and still has many friends there, but this appears to be of no moment to Carson, who lectures her (emphasis mine): the general mainstream media all seems to move in the sec…
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…federal controls over food, drugs, and rail rates. He set up the US Forest Service and brought 230,000,000 acres of land under federal protection from corporate development. He intervened in the 1902 coal miners’ strikes, earning the workers higher pay and a shorter work week. He supported an inheritance tax that would increase with the size of the estate. And set out to use federal power to reform the rules for football. All told, the Lincoln-T.R…
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